RHex is an autonomous robot design, based on hexapod with compliant legs and one actuator per leg. A number of US universities have participated, with funding grants also coming from DARPA.
Versions have shown good mobility over a wide range of terrain types [1] at speeds exceeding five body lengths per second (2.7 m/s), climbed slopes exceeding 45 degrees, swims, and climbs stairs.
The RHex design comes from a multidisciplinary and multi-university DARPA funded effort that applies mathematical techniques from dynamical systems theory to problems of animal locomotion, and, in turn, seeks inspiration from biology in advancing the state of the art of robotic systems. [2] The RHex project received $5 million over 5 years from the DARPA CBS/CBBS program in 1998, and an approximate additional $3 million from other grants, such as National Science Foundation grants. The following Universities participated on the initial RHex project:
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Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the computational problem of constructing or updating a map of an unknown environment while simultaneously keeping track of an agent's location within it. While this initially appears to be a chicken or the egg problem, there are several algorithms known to solve it in, at least approximately, tractable time for certain environments. Popular approximate solution methods include the particle filter, extended Kalman filter, covariance intersection, and GraphSLAM. SLAM algorithms are based on concepts in computational geometry and computer vision, and are used in robot navigation, robotic mapping and odometry for virtual reality or augmented reality.
Swarm robotics is an approach to the coordination of multiple robots as a system which consist of large numbers of mostly simple physical robots. ″In a robot swarm, the collective behavior of the robots results from local interactions between the robots and between the robots and the environment in which they act.″ It is supposed that a desired collective behavior emerges from the interactions between the robots and interactions of robots with the environment. This approach emerged on the field of artificial swarm intelligence, as well as the biological studies of insects, ants and other fields in nature, where swarm behaviour occurs.
Robot locomotion is the collective name for the various methods that robots use to transport themselves from place to place.
Passive dynamics refers to the dynamical behavior of actuators, robots, or organisms when not drawing energy from a supply. Depending on the application, considering or altering the passive dynamics of a powered system can have drastic effects on performance, particularly energy economy, stability, and task bandwidth. Devices using no power source are considered "passive", and their behavior is fully described by their passive dynamics.
The zero moment point is a concept related to the dynamics and control of legged locomotion, e.g., for humanoid or quadrupedal robots. It specifies the point with respect to which reaction forces at the contacts between the feet and the ground do not produce any moment in the horizontal direction, i.e., the point where the sum of horizontal inertia and gravity forces is zero. The concept assumes the contact area is planar and has sufficiently high friction to keep the feet from sliding.
A mobile robot is an automatic machine that is capable of locomotion. Mobile robotics is usually considered to be a subfield of robotics and information engineering.
Modular self-reconfiguring robotic systems or self-reconfigurable modular robots are autonomous kinematic machines with variable morphology. Beyond conventional actuation, sensing and control typically found in fixed-morphology robots, self-reconfiguring robots are also able to deliberately change their own shape by rearranging the connectivity of their parts, in order to adapt to new circumstances, perform new tasks, or recover from damage.
Legged robots are a type of mobile robot which use articulated limbs, such as leg mechanisms, to provide locomotion. They are more versatile than wheeled robots and can traverse many different terrains, though these advantages require increased complexity and power consumption. Legged robots often imitate legged animals, such as humans or insects, in an example of biomimicry.
A rapidly exploring random tree (RRT) is an algorithm designed to efficiently search nonconvex, high-dimensional spaces by randomly building a space-filling tree. The tree is constructed incrementally from samples drawn randomly from the search space and is inherently biased to grow towards large unsearched areas of the problem. RRTs were developed by Steven M. LaValle and James J. Kuffner Jr. They easily handle problems with obstacles and differential constraints and have been widely used in autonomous robotic motion planning.
In robotics and computer vision, visual odometry is the process of determining the position and orientation of a robot by analyzing the associated camera images. It has been used in a wide variety of robotic applications, such as on the Mars Exploration Rovers.
In robotics, the exploration problem deals with the use of a robot to maximize the knowledge over a particular area. The exploration problem arises in robotic mapping and search & rescue situations, where an environment might be dangerous or inaccessible to humans.
William Ward Armstrong is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in 1966 and is most known as the originator Armstrong's axioms of dependency in a Relational database.
In robotics and motion planning, a velocity obstacle, commonly abbreviated VO, is the set of all velocities of a robot that will result in a collision with another robot at some moment in time, assuming that the other robot maintains its current velocity. If the robot chooses a velocity inside the velocity obstacle then the two robots will eventually collide, if it chooses a velocity outside the velocity obstacle, such a collision is guaranteed not to occur.
LAURON is a six-legged walking robot, which is being developed at the FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik in Germany. The mechanics and the movements of the robot are biologically-inspired, mimicking the stick insect Carausius Morosus. The development of the LAURON walking robot started with basic research in field of six-legged locomotion in the early 1990s and led to the first robot, called LAURON. In the year 1994, this robot was presented to public at the CeBIT in Hanover. This first LAURON generation was, in contrast to the current generation, controlled by an artificial neural network, hence the robot's German name: LAUfROboter Neuronal gesteuert. The current generation LARUON V was finished in 2013.
Bio-inspired robotic locomotion is a fairly new subcategory of bio-inspired design. It is about learning concepts from nature and applying them to the design of real-world engineered systems. More specifically, this field is about making robots that are inspired by biological systems, including Biomimicry. Biomimicry is copying from nature while bio-inspired design is learning from nature and making a mechanism that is simpler and more effective than the system observed in nature. Biomimicry has led to the development of a different branch of robotics called soft robotics. The biological systems have been optimized for specific tasks according to their habitat. However, they are multifunctional and are not designed for only one specific functionality. Bio-inspired robotics is about studying biological systems, and looking for the mechanisms that may solve a problem in the engineering field. The designer should then try to simplify and enhance that mechanism for the specific task of interest. Bio-inspired roboticists are usually interested in biosensors, bioactuators, or biomaterials. Most of the robots have some type of locomotion system. Thus, in this article different modes of animal locomotion and few examples of the corresponding bio-inspired robots are introduced.
The TreadPort Active Wind Tunnel is a unique immersive virtual environment that integrates locomotion interfaces with sensory cues such as visual, auditory, olfactory, radiant heat and wind display. The TPAWT augments the Sarcos Treadport consisting of the Cave automatic virtual environment(CAVE) with a subsonic wind tunnel built around the user environment, and adds wind to the virtual environment. The Treadport Active Wind Tunnel is one of the first virtual environments to include wind into the sensory experience of the user. Other systems considering wind display, directly use fans.
The term “soft robots” designs a broad class of robotic systems whose architecture includes soft elements, with much higher elasticity than traditional rigid robots. Articulated Soft Robots are robots with both soft and rigid parts, inspired to the muscloloskeletal system of vertebrate animals – from reptiles to birds to mammalians to humans. Compliance is typically concentrated in actuators, transmission and joints while structural stability is provided by rigid or semi-rigid links.
Aude G. Billard is a Swiss physicist in the fields of machine learning and human-robot interactions. As a full professor at the School of Engineering at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Billard’s research focuses on applying machine learning to support robot learning through human guidance. Billard’s work on human-robot interactions has been recognized numerous times by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and she currently holds a leadership position on the executive committee of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) as the vice president of publication activities.
Elena Garcia Armada is a Spanish researcher, roboticist and business founder who has conducted research on prosthetic exoskeletons to aid people in walking.
A continuum robot is a type of robot that is characterised by infinite degrees of freedom and number of joints. These characteristics allow continuum manipulators to adjust and modify their shape at any point along their length, granting them the possibility to work in confined spaces and complex environments where standard rigid-link robots cannot operate. In particular, we can define a continuum robot as an actuatable structure whose constitutive material forms curves with continuous tangent vectors. This is a fundamental definition that allows to distinguish between continuum robots and snake-arm robots or hyper-redundant manipulators: the presence of rigid links and joints allows them to only approximately perform curves with continuous tangent vectors.
