'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Abstract
Presented at the 2008 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2008, 22-26 Sept. 2008.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
