Have you ever dreamed of flying? The Symbiotic Drone Activity is a project that aims to give you the sensation of flying while controlling a real drone. The goal of… Read more
Looking for publications? You might want to consider searching on the EPFL Infoscience site which provides advanced publication search capabilities.
Morphology plays an important role in behavioral and locomotion strategies of living and artificial systems. There is biological evidence that adaptive morphological changes can not only extend dynamic performances by reducing tradeoffs during locomotion but also provide new functionalities. In this article, we show that adaptive morphology is an emerging design principle in robotics that benefits from a new generation of soft, variable-stiffness, and functional materials and structures. When moving within a given environment or when transitioning between different substrates, adaptive morphology allows accommodation of opposing dynamic requirements (e.g., maneuverability, stability, efficiency, and speed). Adaptive morphology is also a viable solution to endow robots with additional functionalities, such as transportability, protection, and variable gearing. We identify important research and technological questions, such as variable-stiffness structures, in silico design tools, and adaptive control systems to fully leverage adaptive morphology in robotic systems.
The use of free vibration in elastic structure can lead to energy efficient robot locomotion, since it significantly reduces the energy expenditure if properly designed and controlled. However, it is not well understood how to harness the dynamics of free vibration for the robot locomotion, because of the complex dynamics originated in discrete events and energy dissipation during locomotion. From this perspective, the goal of this paper is to propose a design strategy of hopping robot based on elastic curved beams and actuated rotating masses, and identify the minimalistic model that can characterize the basic principle of robot locomotion. Since the robot mainly exhibits vertical hopping, three one-dimensional models are examined that contain different configurations of simple spring-damper-mass components. The real-world and simulation experiments show that one of the models best characterizes the robot hopping, through analyzing the basic kinematics and negative works in actuation. Based on this model, the self-stability of hopping motion under disturbances is investigated and design and control parameters are analyzed for the energy efficient hopping. Additionally, further analyses show that this robot can achieve the energy efficient hopping with the variation in payload, and the source of energy dissipation of the robot hopping is investigated.
This paper introduces StarlETH, a compliant quadrupedal robot that is designed to study fast, efficient, and versatile locomotion. The platform is fully actuated with high compliant series elastic actuation, making the system torque controllable and at the same time well suited for highly dynamic maneuvers. We additionally emphasize key elements of a powerful real time control and simulation environment. The work is concluded with a number of experiments that demonstrate the performance of the presented hardware and controllers.