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Tetrabot: Resonance Based Locomotion for Harsh Enviroments
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Tetrabot: Resonance Based Locomotion for Harsh Enviroments   (Citations: 1)
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Tetrabot combines the benefits of existing enclosed robots with passive dynamics. This results in a mobile robot with no moving parts exposed to the environment making it ideal for tasks where wheeled or legged robots fail. Instead of suppressing resonance like most machines, this new robot morphology relies on the dynamics of resonance for locomotion. Actuators mounted on a central sphere excite a natural mode of vibration by pulling on strings through which the sphere is mounted to a tetrahedral frame. A simple open loop controller is sufficient to cause directed motion by hopping and sliding in a prototype. Rolling as a further gait is investigated theoretically. Fully enclosed resonant dynamic robots could lead to a new type of robot locomotion powered from a vibration source only. This is useful in the microscale where traditional actuators are not available and at the macroscale where the robot's high ruggedness is favorable. I. INTRODUCTION THE vast majority of mobile robots to date achieves the capability of locomotion through actuators on the outside of the robot body. Most frequently these are wheels or legs, each being actively controlled. That means, every movement of the actuator corresponds to a desired change in robot position and is therefore planned and controlled within tight bounds. Wheels are often favored because two actuators are sufficient to provide three degrees of freedom for a planar robot and the transformation between actuator motion and robot motion is easy. Legged robots are often seen as a biomimetic alternative to wheeled robots and are usually capable of navigating more complex terrain than wheeled robots. Both wheeled and legged robots have the disadvantage that the mechanically complex actuated joints are closest to the ground and therefore prone to damage by external influences like sand, moisture, temperature or radiation. The conventional solution to this problem is to design the actuators for harsh environments, for example by including seals and guards. In this paper the task of robot locomotion in harsh envi- ronments is approached from a dual perspective. First, we present exploratory work towards a new robot morphology that keeps all actuators enclosed in a rigid protective hull.
Conference: International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems - IROS , pp. 2431-2436, 2010
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