11 accepted papers
We present a rolling and jumping underactuated monopedal robot designed to explore multimodal locomotion on low-gravity bodies. It uses only two reaction wheels to control its spatial orientation with two controllers: a balancing controller which can aim the robot’s jump direction on the ground, and…
Arboreal environments challenge current robots but are deftly traversed by many familiar animals such as squirrels. We present a small, 450 g robot “Pinto” developed for tree-jumping, a behavior seen in squirrels but rarely in legged robots: jumping from the ground onto a vertical tree trunk. We dev
This study presents the development, characterization, and demonstration of a tunable substrate for small jumping robots. Jumping robots in the literature are typically evaluated when jumping from rigid surfaces, in contrast to surfaces with more significant compliance or damping that are encountere
Soldiers in the field often need to cross negative obstacles, such as rivers or canyons, to reach goals or safety. Military gap crossing involves on-site temporary bridges construction. However, this procedure is conducted with dangerous, time and labor intensive operations, and specialized machiner…
Entanglements like vines and branches in natural settings or cords and pipes in human spaces prevent mobile robots from accessing many environments. Legged robots should be effective in these settings, and more so than wheeled or tracked platforms, but naive controllers quickly become entangled and…
Legged robots leverage ground contacts and the reaction forces they provide to achieve agile locomotion. However, uncertainty coupled with contact discontinuities can lead to failure, especially in real-world environments with unexpected height variations such as rocky hills or curbs. To enable dyna…
Prior work has addressed control of continuous jumping using touchdown angle from flight, but greater precision can be obtained by directing individual leaps using liftoff angle from stance. We demonstrate targeted leaping as well as balanced landingon a narrow foot with a small, single leg hopping
We develop a drift-free roll and pitch attitude estimation scheme for monopedal jumping robots. The estimator uses only onboard rate gyroscopes and encoders and does not rely on external sensing or processing. It is capable of recovering from attitude estimate disturbances and, together with onboard…
We developed a deadbeat foot placement hopping controller for an untethered monopedal robot, Salto-1P. The controller uses a third order Taylor series approximation to an offline dynamic model and performs well on the physical platform. The robot demonstrated precise foot placement even on trajector…
In this work we present a new robotic system, Salto-1P, for exploring extreme jumping locomotion. Salto-1P weighs 0.098 kg, and has an active leg length of 14.4 cm. The robot is able to perform a standing vertical leap of 1.25 m, continuously hop to heights over 1 m, and jump over 2 m horizontally.…
New work in robotics targets the development of controllable agile motions such as leaping. In this work, we examine animal and robotic systems on the metric of jumping agility and find that animals can outperform the most agile robots by a factor of two. These specially adapted animals use a jumpin…