Unified Behavior Framework in an Embedded Robot Controller

Robots of varying autonomy have been used to take the place of humans in dangerous tasks. While robots are considered more expendable than human beings, they are complex to develop and expensive to replace if lost. Recent technological advances produce small, inexpensive hardware platforms that are powerful enough to match robots from just a few years ago. There are many types of autonomous control architecture that can be used to control these hardware platforms. One in particular, the Unified Behavior Framework, is a flexible, responsive control architecture that is designed to simplify the control system’s design process through behavior module reuse, and provides a means to speed software development. However, it has not been applied on embedded systems in robots. This thesis presents a development of the Unified Behavior Framework on the Mini-WHEGS™, a biologically inspired, embedded robotic platform. The Mini-WHEGS™ is a small robot that utilize wheel- legs to emulate cockroach walking patterns. Wheel-legs combine wheels and legs for high mobility without the complex control system required for legs. A color camera and a rotary encoder completes the robot, enabling the Mini-WHEGS™ to identify color objects and track its position. A hardware abstraction layer designed for the Mini-WHEGS™ in this configuration decouples the control system from the hardware and provide the interface between the software and the hardware. The result is a highly mobile embedded robot system capable of exchanging behavior modules with much larger robots while requiring little or no change to the modules

The Flying Monkey: a Mesoscale Robot that can Run, Fly, and Grasp

The agility and ease of control make a quadrotor aircraft an attractive platform for studying swarm behavior, modeling, and control. The energetics of sustained flight for small aircraft, however, limit typical applications to only a few minutes. Adding payloads – and the mechanisms used to manipulate them – reduces this flight time even further. In this paper we present the flying monkey, a novel robot platform having three main capabilities: walking, grasping, and flight. This new robotic platform merges one of the world’s smallest quadrotor aircraft with a lightweight, single-degree-of-freedom walking mechanism and an SMA-actuated gripper to enable all three functions in a 30 g package. The main goal and key contribution of this paper is to design and prototype the flying monkey that has increased mission life and capabilities through the combination of the functionalities of legged and aerial roots.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (IIS-1138847)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (EFRI-124038)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (CCF-1138967)United States. Army Research Laboratory (W911NF-08-2-0004)Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineerin

Rapid inversion: running animals and robots swing like a pendulum under ledges.

Escaping from predators often demands that animals rapidly negotiate complex environments. The smallest animals attain relatively fast speeds with high frequency leg cycling, wing flapping or body undulations, but absolute speeds are slow compared to larger animals. Instead, small animals benefit from the advantages of enhanced maneuverability in part due to scaling. Here, we report a novel behavior in small, legged runners that may facilitate their escape by disappearance from predators. We video recorded cockroaches and geckos rapidly running up an incline toward a ledge, digitized their motion and created a simple model to generalize the behavior. Both species ran rapidly at 12-15 body lengths-per-second toward the ledge without braking, dove off the ledge, attached their feet by claws like a grappling hook, and used a pendulum-like motion that can exceed one meter-per-second to swing around to an inverted position under the ledge, out of sight. We discovered geckos in Southeast Asia can execute this escape behavior in the field. Quantification of these acrobatic behaviors provides biological inspiration toward the design of small, highly mobile search-and-rescue robots that can assist us during natural and human-made disasters. We report the first steps toward this new capability in a small, hexapedal robot

Locomation strategies for amphibious robots-a review

In the past two decades, unmanned amphibious robots have proven the most promising and efficient systems ranging from scientific, military, and commercial applications. The applications like monitoring, surveillance, reconnaissance, and military combat operations require platforms to maneuver on challenging, complex, rugged terrains and diverse environments. The recent technological advancements and development in aquatic robotics and mobile robotics have facilitated a more agile, robust, and efficient amphibious robots maneuvering in multiple environments and various terrain profiles. Amphibious robot locomotion inspired by nature, such as amphibians, offers augmented flexibility, improved adaptability, and higher mobility over terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial mediums. In this review, amphibious robots' locomotion mechanism designed and developed previously are consolidated, systematically The review also analyzes the literature on amphibious robot highlighting the limitations, open research areas, recent key development in this research field. Further development and contributions to amphibious robot locomotion, actuation, and control can be utilized to perform specific missions in sophisticated environments, where tasks are unsafe or hardly feasible for the divers or traditional aquatic and terrestrial robots

Kinematic Design, Analysis and Simulation of a Hybrid Robot with Terrain and Aerial Locomotion Capability

Having only one type of locomotion mechanism limits the stability and locomotion capability of a mobile robot on irregular terrain surfaces. One of the possible solution to this is combining more than one locomotion mechanisms in the robot. In this paper, robotic platform composed of a quadruped module for terrain locomotion and quadrotor module for aerial locomotion is introduced. This design is inspired by the way which birds are using their wings and legs for stability in slopped and uneven surfaces. The main idea is to combine the two systems in such a way that the strengths of both subsystems are used, and the weakness of the either systems are covered. The ability of the robot to reach the target position quickly and to avoid large terrestrial obstacles by flying expands its application in various areas of search and rescue. The same platform can be used for detailed 3D mapping and aerial mapping which are very helpful in rescue operations. In particular, this paper presents kinematic design, analysis and simulation of such a robotic system. Simulation and verification of results are done using MATLAB

An Overview of Legged Robots

The objective of this paper is to present the evolution and the state-of-theart in the area of legged locomotion systems. In a first phase different possibilities for mobile robots are discussed, namely the case of artificial legged locomotion systems, while emphasizing their advantages and limitations. In a second phase an historical overview of the evolution of these systems is presented, bearing in mind several particular cases often considered as milestones on the technological and scientific progress. After this historical timeline, some of the present day systems are examined and their performance is analyzed. In a third phase are pointed out the major areas for research and development that are presently being followed in the construction of legged robots. Finally, some of the problems still unsolved, that remain defying robotics research, are also addressed.N/