High-rate controlled turning with a pair of miniature legged robots
TaeWon Seo, Carlos S. Casarez, Ronald S. Fearing
Abstract
Legged robots can explore unstructured environments more effectively than wheeled robots, but high turning rate tracking is still a challenging problem, particularly on varying surfaces. Previous steering methods with small robots have shown high turn rates, but usually only on a limited set of surfaces. This paper proposes a new method for steering a miniaturized legged robot by cooperation between two robots connected by a compliant joint, creating a 73 gram, 12 legged robot. Detailed design issues and an empirical verification are presented for several cooperation strategies, including changing velocities of the 4 sets of leg triples. The robots use their combined traction forces to turn at better than 50 degrees/sec at 1 m/sec on various surfaces. Closed-loop steering using a differential drive strategy is implemented on the connected robots to track a “figure 8” trajectory on a tile surface.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{icra2017_highratecontroll,
title = {High-rate controlled turning with a pair of miniature legged robots},
author = {TaeWon Seo and Carlos S. Casarez and Ronald S. Fearing},
booktitle = {ICRA 2017},
year = {2017}
}