Servo - October 2013

8 SERVO 10.2013

by Jeff and Jenn Eckert

Robytes

Robot Flies and Walks

Most flying bots are equipped with some sort of landing gear — typically wheels — so they can move along the ground when necessary.

Unfortunately, that adds to the structural weight, and simple wheels aren't particularly good at navigating over rough terrain. Never fear, however, because the folks at EPFL's Laboratory of Intelligent Systems ( lis.epfl.ch) have come up with the Deployable Air Land Exploration Robot (DALER) which incorporates

"adaptive morphology" to repurpose its wings for walking. These wing-legs ("whegs") are designed to manage more complex terrains, including semi-collapsed buildings, caverns, and forests. This is intended to make DALERs useful for applications like search-and-rescue, environmental monitoring, and other tasks in which they are able to fly, hover, and crawl as required. According to its developers,

"The morphology of the robot is optimized for ground speed. It can move forward at 0.2 m/s (8 in/s) and can rotate on spot at 25°/s. The robot is capable of walking with different gaits, it can move on different surfaces, it can overcome high obstacles, and it can also navigate in rough terrains." Its gait is not exactly graceful, as you can see in a You Tube video (just search "daler robot"). Plus, in its present form at least, you toss DALER like a Frisbee to launch it, so it doesn't appear to be capable of becoming airborne on its own. I'm sure they'll work that out. DALER flies, hovers, and uses

"whegs" to move over rough surfaces.

Hexapod Lite Debuts

Designed to handle much more challenging obstacles is RHex, which is short for "robot hexapod." This hopperbot was actually developed a decade ago in a multi-university collaboration, but the latest version — X-RHex Lite (a.k.a., XRL) — is lighter and more agile. Recently introduced by the University of Pennsylvania's Kod*lab, it "can execute double jumps, flips, and — through a combination of moves — even pull-ups. For the tallest obstacles, the robot can launch itself vertically, hook its front legs on the edge of the object it's trying to surmount, then drag its body up and over." The ultimate aim is to create a machine that can easily flip over rubble in a rescue mission or collect environmental data while crossing the desert.