ICRA 2024 Paper and Expo Demonstration

Created in May 15, 2024

We got to present a paper at the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) conference in Yokohama, Japan. This paper [1] was the excellent work of a very talented undergraduate, Katelyn King, who joined the lab as a Mu-RoAM student and stayed on to do her own project. She also created two videos to demonstrate the results, one for the paper and one for the robot expo demo we did.

The robot itself is an ESP32 based version of our Medium-ANT robot, which was originally designed and built by Hao Luo using the Polulu Wixel hardware, but recently revised to use the ESP32-CAM board with the help of Enxu Liu and my start-up co-founder Benny Shani. This new iteration of Medium-ANT costs about $150 in parts – probably the least expensive hexapedal robot you can build.

Additional Video

References

2024

Self-Righting Shell for Robotic Hexapod

Katelyn King, and Shai Revzen

In 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2024

Abs DOI PDF

Decimeter scale robots in human environments are small relative to obstacles they encounter, making them prone to flipping over and needing to self-right. We present a multifaceted shell that by its geometry alone enables the hexapedal robot MediumANT to passively self-right without the need for additional sensory feedback. We designed the shell by specifying the cross-sectional geometry in the yz and xy planes such that the robot returns to an upright position by rolling around the longitudinal (x) axis, and then tweaked the design to reduce the number of faces. We then attached the shell to the robot by modifying some of its chassis structural plates to extend to and support the shell. We evaluated the effectiveness of the shell in two experimental scenarios: passive righting ? balancing the robot on each face of the shell before releasing the robot ? and an intentional fall ? walking the robot off a ledge at various approach angles. As intended by our design, the robot recovered the upright orientation from all starting faces in the passive righting test and righted itself and continued walking in all falling trials. This work presents an example of using biologically inspired simplicity to solve what would otherwise be a technically challenging problem.