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ItemMarch of the SandBots(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-04) Goldman, Daniel I. ; Komsuoglu, Haldun ; Koditschek, Daniel E.Goldman at Georgia Tech, Koditschek and Komsuoglu at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, and other collaborators - are hoping that by studying the zebra-tailed lizard and a menagerie of other desert-dwelling creatures, we can create more agile versions of their six-legged robot, SandBot.
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ItemSensitive dependence of the motion of a legged robot on granular media(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-03-03) Li, Chen ; Umbanhowar, Paul B. ; Komsuoglu, Haldun ; Koditschek, Daniel E. ; Goldman, Daniel I.Legged locomotion on flowing ground (e.g., granular media) is unlike locomotion on hard ground because feet experience both solid- and fluid-like forces during surface penetration. Recent bioinspired legged robots display speed relative to body size on hard ground comparable with high-performing organisms like cockroaches but suffer significant performance loss on flowing materials like sand. In laboratory experiments, we study the performance (speed) of a small (2.3 kg) 6-legged robot, SandBot, as it runs on a bed of granular media (1-mm poppy seeds). For an alternating tripod gait on the granular bed, standard gait control parameters achieve speeds at best 2 orders of magnitude smaller than the 2 body lengths/s (≈60 cm/s) for motion on hard ground. However, empirical adjustment of these control parameters away from the hard ground settings restores good performance, yielding top speeds of 30 cm/s. Robot speed depends sensitively on the packing fraction φ and the limb frequency ω, and a dramatic transition from rotary walking to slow swimming occurs when φ becomes small enough and/or ω large enough. We propose a kinematic model of the rotary walking mode based on generic features of penetration and slip of a curved limb in granular media. The model captures the dependence of robot speed on limb frequency and the transition between walking and swimming modes but highlights the need for a deeper understanding of the physics of granular media.
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ItemIntegrating a Hierarchy of Simulation Tools for Legged Robot Locomotion(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-09) Slatton, Andrew ; Cohen, Daniel ; Ding, Yang ; Umbanhowar, Paul B. ; Goldman, Daniel I. ; Haynes, G. Clark ; Komsuoglu, Haldun ; Koditschek, Daniel E.We are interested in the development of a variety of legged robot platforms intended for operation in unstructured outdoor terrain. In such settings, the traditions of rational engineering design, driven by analytically informed and computationally assisted studies of robot-environment models, remain ineffective due to the complexity of both the robot designs and the terrain in which they must operate. Instead, empirical trial and error often drives the necessary incremental and iterative design process, hence the development of such robots remains expensive both in time and cost, and is often closely dependent upon the substrate properties of the locomotion terrain. This paper describes a series of concurrent but increasingly coordinated software development efforts that aim to diminish the gap between easily interfaced and physically sound computational models of a real robot’s operation in a complex natural environment. We describe a robot simulation environment in which simple robot modifications can be easily prototyped along and “played” into phenomenological models of contact mechanics. We particularly focus on the daunting but practically compelling example of robot feet interacting granular media, such as gravel or sand, offering a brief report of our progress in deriving and importing physically accurate but computationally tractable phenomenological substrate models into the robot execution simulation environment. With a goal of integration for future robot prototyping simulations, we review the prospects for diminishing the gap between the integrated computational models and the needs of physical platform development.
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ItemToward a dynamic climbing robot(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2006) Clark, Jonathan E. ; Goldman, Daniel I. ; Chen, Tao S. ; Full, Robert J. ; Koditschek, Daniel E.Simple mathematical models or ‘templates’ of locomotion have been effective tools in understanding how animals move and have inspired and guided the design of robots that emulate those behaviors. This paper describes a recently proposed biologically-based template for dynamic vertical climbing, and evaluates the feasibility of adapting it to build a vertical ‘running’ robot. We present the results a simulation study suggesting that appropriate mechanical and control alterations to the template result in fast stable climbing that preserves the characteristic body motions and foot forces found in the template model and in animals. These design changes should also allow the robot to operate with commercially available actuators and in the same power to weight range as other running and climbing robots.
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ItemRobotics in Scansorial Environments(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2005) Autumn, Kellar ; Buehler, Martin ; Cutkosky, Mark ; Fearing, Ronald S. ; Full, Robert J. ; Goldman, Daniel I. ; Groff, Richard ; Provancher, William ; Rizzi, Alfred E. ; Saranli, Uluc ; Saunders, Aaron ; Koditschek, Daniel E.