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WildCat is a four-legged robot being developed to run fast on all types of terrain. So far WildCat has run at about 16 mph on flat terrain using bounding and galloping gaits. The video shows WildCat’s best performance so far. WildCat is being developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from DARPA’s M3 program.

Resources

For more information about WIldCat visit our website at www.BostonDynamics.com.

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In nature, small animals or insects use multiple locomotion methods to efficiently travel in difficult environments. Inspired by the multi-modal locomotion ability found in animals, we design a miniature robot that can jump, run, and perform aerial maneuvering. Specifically, this robot can use wheeled locomotion to run on flat ground. Encountering a large obstacle, it can jump up to overcome the obstacle.

After leaping into the air, the robot can control its body angle using its tail for aerial maneuvering. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first miniature (maximum size 7.5 centimeters) and lightweight (26.5 grams) robot that having all the three capabilities. Furthermore, this robot is equipped with on-board energy, sensing, control, and wireless communication capabilities, which enables the tetherless or autonomous operation. It has many applications ranging from search and rescue, military surveillance, and environmental monitoring.

ARTICLE by Evan Ackerman

We first met Jianguo Zhao’s jumping robot at ICRA 2011. We were impressed because of how tiny it was, but also because it could change direction, self-right, and jump, all using just one single motor and a clever arrangement of gears. A new upgrade (inspired by research from UC Berkely) adds a tail to the mix, giving this little robot the ability to orient itself in midair. Oh, and it can also run, because why not.

Adding a tail also involved adding an extra motor to the robot, but there was no way that the designers could tolerate such inefficiency. So, the tail motor and gear can team up with a gear on the jumping motor to give the robot the ability to move horizontally along the ground. My guess is that the next iteration of this robot that we see will (somehow) have that motor enabling three abilities instead of just two.

The total weight of the robot is still just 26 grams, and it’s only 7.5 centimeters tall. It can jump over 80 centimeters up (with a 75 degree takeoff angle), and while “running,” it can reach speeds of nearly 4 cm/s. In addition, the robot is equipped with on-board sensors, and of course it can be controlled wirelessly or made fully autonomous, and the designers speculate that it might be appropriate for applications like search and rescue, military surveillance, and environmental monitoring.

Officially, this research will be presented at IROS 2013 in Toyko this November, but a pre-print edition of the full paper is already available below…

Controlling Aerial Maneuvering of a Miniature Jumping Robot Using Its Tail

Download PDF 

Links:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/tiny-jumping-robot-finds-room-for-a-tail
Video Link: http://youtu.be/oEnQQJC5Lxc

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RHex is an all-terrain walking robot that could one day climb over rubble in a rescue mission or cross the desert with environmental sensors strapped to its back. Pronounced “Rex,” like the over-excited puppy it resembles when it is bounding over the ground, RHex is short for “robot hexapod,” a name that stems from its six springy legs.

Legs have an advantage over wheels when it comes to rough terrain, but the articulated legs often found on walking robots require complex, specialized instructions for each moving part. To get the most mobility out of RHex’s simple, one-jointed legs, Penn researchers are essentially teaching the robot Parkour. Taking inspiration from human free-runners, the team is showing the robot how to manipulate its body in creative ways to get around all sorts of obstacles.

The RHex platform was first developed through a multi-university collaboration more than a decade ago. Graduate student Aaron Johnson and professor Daniel Koditschek, both of the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, are working on a version of RHex known as XRL, or X-RHex Lite. This lighter and more agile version of the robot, developed in Koditschek’s Kod*Lab, a division of Engineering’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab, is ideal for testing new ways for it to run, jump, and climb.

By activating its legs in different sequences, XRL can execute double jumps, flips, and, through a combination of moves, even pull-ups. For the tallest obstacles, the robot can launch itself vertically, hook its front legs on the edge of the object it’s trying to surmount, then drag its body up and over. The researchers fully demonstrated this particular maneuver under more controlled conditions in the lab.

The paper where Johnson and Koditschek outlined these capabilities—”Toward a Vocabulary of Legged Leaping“—was selected as a finalist for best student paper at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in May.

“What we want is a robot that can go anywhere, even over terrain that might be broken and uneven,” Johnson says. “These latest jumps greatly expand the range of what this machine is capable of, as it can now jump onto or across obstacles that are bigger than it is.”

ARTICLE By Evan Ackerman

RHex has been practicing its jumping skills, and UPenn has a tremendous new video of the robot doing Parkour across campus rooftops.

Was one of these moves particularly difficult to pull off? If so, why, and how’d you solve it?

The double jump across a gap is probably the hardest, in addition to being one of the more dangerous. There are some interesting trade-offs when it comes to gap jumping: do you want to start closer to the gap so you don’t have to jump as far, or do you want to start farther back so you can get full traction with all of your legs? In the end, it helps to sneak up as close as you can to the edge while still getting some amount of torque out of the middle legs on that second bounce. Backing up farther to let the front legs help ended up being a little worse.

One move that didn’t make it is the pull-up onto the table’s edge. That move is still much too hard to do outdoors, and relies on very subtle leg stretching and ground interactions that we are in the process of modeling more carefully.

What are some ways that you might be able to make RHex faster than a speeding bullet and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound?

Well, we can already leap onto ledges in a single bound that are tall compared to the robot, but in order to really push the performance of a robot such as RHex it helps to have a very good actuator model. The motors in this robot are rated to about 2-3A continuous current, but to get these moves I’ve set the current limit at 20A. This means that they heat up quite quickly, but with a good thermal model we can monitor the motor core temperature and ensure that for these quick leaps they stay within the thermal limits. For the worst of these jumps, we know that the motor core heats up by 50C in less than half a second. Knowing how far you can push your robot is key to getting these kinds of peak performance behaviors.

Will this project be extended? If so, what are you working on next, and what are your long-term hopes/dreams/fantasies for RHex?
Yes, this project is ongoing, and one of the challenges that I’m excited to try and tackle is running transitions. Most of these dynamic transitions start from rest, but we have some early results with running flips that look promising. We are also eager to take these behaviors out to the desert where we’ve done some testing with RHex in the past. These behaviors should enable RHex to access even more of the terrain out there.

Any chance of seeing some outtakes? I bet there are some good ones!
The outtakes are pretty painful, if you have any empathy for the robot. In truth RHex can take quite a beating and still run most of the time, but it is hard to watch. We may post some outtakes in the future, for now though we will be posting a longer version of this video with extended clips and some additional angles that didn’t make it into the final cut.

Links:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/aerial-robots/rhex-does-parkour-all-over-upenn

http://kodlab.seas.upenn.edu/Aaron/ICRA2013

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Researchers at Berkeley’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab have been able to create this “sprawl tuned autonomous robot” AKA STAR using 3D printed pieces. David Zarrouk, Andrew Pullin, Nick Kohut, and Ronald Fearing created the robot out of a number of simple, easily replaceable and biomimetic parts.

The robot can move up to 5.2 meters per second and it is especially quick on smooth surfaces. A simple control board and simple motors control the star-shaped wheels and collapsible arms.

The team aims to make it a sort of field-repairable search and rescue bot. Because you can print parts for it quickly using almost any 3D printer and it weighs only a few grams, you can carry a few of them and not worry if they break on transport. You can read a bit more about the robot here or you can just sleep with one eye open in hopes of catching this little thing before it catches you.

About the Project

This movie shows some unique feature of STAR (Sprawl Tuned Autonomous Robot). The biomimetic robot is 3D printed and controls its sprawl angle control which allows him to perform many maneuvers to overcome obstacles. In the movie the robot sprawls down and goes under a door then sprawls up.

It can run at all speeds up to 5.2m/s (43 body lengths per second) on smooth surfaces while steering is on (i.e. it can be controlled to run in straight line or turn). The legs slide to the side in order to reduce collisions with the ground which allow for better stability and steering control.

The robot was designed by:

David Zarrouk, Andrew Pullin, Nick Kohut and Ronald Fearing at the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, UC Berkeley. (Reference: ICRA 2013)

This is the third version of our robot, we made some mechanical improvements. We added fiber reinforced rods to reduce collision damage at high speeds.

Resources:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/15/watch-this-creepy-little-robot-that-can-sneak-under-your-door/
Video Link – http://youtu.be/vXVRCpDLSHI

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This partially 3D-printed prototype can be produced for less than $1,000, much less than commercial utility line robots.

You only need to experience another blackout for a reminder of the importance of power grid maintenance. Robots that crawl along and inspect power lines could save utilities a bundle in preventive checks.  We’ve seen a few designs for machines that can take on this dangerous and tricky job, such as Hydro-Quebec’s LineScout, but they can still cost tens of thousands of dollars. Engineers at the University of California at San Diego have developed a cheap and fast wire-crawling inspection robot called the SkySweeper. Made of off-the-shelf electronics and 3D-printed parts , the basic bot can be produced for less than $1,000.

The V-shaped bot hangs from a wire and works around a spring-elastic elbow joint. It moves along like an upside-down inchworm as its cable-hugging clamps open and close. It’s a basic prototype with a lithium-polymer battery and an Arduino controller, yet it can be augmented with cameras for inspection or induction coils to grab power from the line. That could let it stay aloft on the grid for months at a time.

If it faces a support bracket or other obstacle along the cable, SkySweeper can do a back flip to get past it. “Current line inspection robots are large, complex, and expensive,” Nick Morozovsky, a UCSD mechanical engineering grad student who designed the robot, said in a release. “Utility companies may also use manned or unmanned helicopters equipped with infrared imaging to inspect lines. This is much simpler.” Morozovsky will present the robot at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2013) in November in Tokyo, and also has it as an entry in the Road to Maker Faire Challenge.

Mechanical engineers at the University of California, San Diego invented a robot designed to scoot along utility lines, searching for damage and other problems that require repairs. Made of off-the-shelf electronics and plastic parts printed on an inexpensive 3D printer, the SkySweeper prototype could be scaled up for less than $1,000, making it significantly more economical than the two models of robots currently used to inspect power lines.

“Current line inspection robots are large, complex, and expensive. Utility companies may also use manned or unmanned helicopters equipped with infrared imaging to inspect lines,” said Nick Morozovsky, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at UC San Diego, who designed the robot. “This is much simpler.”

About The SkySweeper Project

By: Nick Morozovsky, Roboticist
Description:  SkySweeper is designed to move along rope or cable like no other robot. Existing robots that inspect power lines are large, slow, and expensive. SkySweeper is small, fast, and almost all parts of the robot are 3D printed or available cheaply off-the-shelf.

Hobby servos move the clamps on either end to one of three positions: either open, partially closed such that the clamp can roll along the cable, or fully closed such that the clamp can only pivot on the cable. A motor at the “elbow” joint of the robot is connected to a spring, together the motor and spring are called a Series Elastic Actuator (SEA), which can both change the angle between the links and store potential energy in the spring when both clamps are locked on the cable.

Sensors measure the angle between the links, how much energy is stored in the spring, and if a cable is within reach of each clamp. The robot is controlled with a finite state machine controller programmed as a switch structure on an Arduino Uno. A lithium polymer battery powers the motors, sensors, and Arduino.

SkySweeper can move along cable in multiple different ways. It can “inchworm” along by opening and closing its links and controlling which clamp is rolling or only pivoting. If SkySweeper needs to avoid an obstacle on the cable, like a support holding onto the cable, it can do a backflip to get past the obstacle, it can even keep on backflipping along the cable!

Morozovsky, who works in the lab of Professor Thomas Bewley at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, will introduce the robot at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, also known as IROS 2013, from Nov. 3 to 8 in Tokyo. He will also present a paper, titled “A Low Degrees of Freedom, Dynamic High Wire Robot,” at the conference.

Resource Links:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57597264-1/low-cost-skysweeper-inspection-robot-scoots-along-power-lines/

http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=1352

http://review.wizehive.com/voting/view/makermedia2013/15849/1387186/0

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Main Components:
1) Axon Microcontroller
2) 6V 3200mAh Re/ch. Battery
3) 1 Infrared Sensor
4) 2 Light Sensors
5) 21 Hitec Servos
6) Aluminium Brackets

Functions:
1) Walk on four legs
2) Pass through a gap of minimum 8cm
3) Roll up a ramp up to 45º slope
4) Climb a height up to 12 cm
5) Crawl on irregular surfaces

Practical Applications:
1) Military missions
2) Exploration of planets
3) Rescue operations

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Resources & Links

-http://io.workspace.howest.be/TIII/?page_id=772
-http://www.tiii.be/?p=2874
-http://www.tiii.be/?p=2703

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This Comprehensive Hexapod Kit comes with everything you need for a fully-featured robotic platform.

All 18 Dynamixels (preset with IDs), frame components, anodized black socket-head hardware, a pre-programmed ArbotiX Robocontroller, FTDI interface for programming, the handheld ArbotiX Commander, a set of paired Xbees, a PC-side Xbee USB interface, 3S 2100mAh Thunder Power LiPo Battery, Multi-Function LiPo Balance Charger, and even a bottle of Threadlocker! We also have highly detailed step-by-step assembly manuals to ensure your kit goes together smoothly.

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