A new study led by <a href="https://mechse.illinois.edu/" id="isPasted" target="_blank">mechanical science and engineering</a> professor <a href="https://mechse.illinois.edu/people/profile/tawfick" target="_blank">Sameh Tawfick</a> demonstrates a series of click beetle-sized robots small enough to fit into tight spaces, powerful enough to maneuver over obstacles and fast enough to match an insect&rsquo;s rapid escape time.&nbsp;The findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Princeton University have studied click beetle anatomy, mechanics and evolution over the past decade.&nbsp;<a href="https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/589930360" target="_blank">A 2020 study</a> found that snap buckling &ndash; the rapid release of elastic energy &ndash; of a coiled muscle within a click beetle&rsquo;s thorax is triggered to allow them to propel themselves in the air many times their body length, as a means of righting themselves if flipped onto their backs.&ldquo;One of the grand challenges of small-scale robotics is finding a design that is small, yet powerful enough to move around obstacles or quickly escape dangerous settings,&rdquo; Tawfick said.In the new study, Tawfick and his team used tiny <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax7304" target="_blank">coiled actuators</a> &ndash; analogous to animal muscles &ndash; that pull on a beam-shaped mechanism, causing it to slowly buckle and store elastic energy until it is spontaneously released and amplified, propelling the robots upward.<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3udLRU9_qog?&wmode=opaque&rel=0&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://www.wevolver.com" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable" data-lf-form-tracking-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true" data-lf-yt-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true" data-lf-vimeo-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true" style="width: 765px; height: 509px;"></iframe>&ldquo;This process, called a dynamic buckling cascade, is simple compared to the anatomy of a click beetle,&rdquo; Tawfick said. &ldquo;However, simple is good in this case because it allows us to work and fabricate parts at this small scale.&rdquo;Guided by biological evolution and mathematical models, the team built and tested four device variations, landing on two configurations that can successfully jump without manual intervention.&ldquo;Moving forward, we do not have a set approach on the exact design of the next generation of these robots, but this study plants a seed in the evolution of this technology &ndash; a process similar to biologic evolution,&rdquo; Tawfick said.The team envisions these robots accessing tight spaces to help perform maintenance on large machines like turbines and jet engines, for example, by taking pictures to identify problems.&ldquo;We also imagine insect-scale robots being useful in modern agriculture,&rdquo; Tawfick said. &ldquo;Scientists and farmers currently use drones and rovers to monitor crops, but sometimes researchers need a sensor to touch a plant or to capture a photograph of a very small-scale feature. Insect-scale robots can do that.&rdquo;Researchers from the University of Birmingham, UK; Oxford University; and the University of Texas at Dallas also participated in this research.The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Toyota Research Institute North America, the National Science Foundation and The Royal Society supported this study.

Mechanical science and engineering professor Sameh Tawfick led a new study introducing click beetle-sized robots small enough to fit into tight spaces, powerful enough to maneuver over obstacles and fast enough to match an insect’s rapid escape time. Graphic by Michael Vincent

Researchers have made a significant leap forward in developing insect-sized jumping robots capable of performing tasks in the small spaces often found in mechanical, agricultural and search-and-rescue settings.  

Click beetle-inspired robots jump using elastic energy

MIT&rsquo;s new mini cheetah robot is springy and light on its feet, with a range of motion that rivals a champion gymnast. The four-legged powerpack can bend and swing its legs wide, enabling it to walk either right-side up or upside down. The robot can also trot over uneven terrain about twice as fast as an average person&rsquo;s walking speed.Weighing in at just 20 pounds &mdash; lighter than some Thanksgiving turkeys &mdash; the limber quadruped is no pushover: When kicked to the ground, the robot can quickly right itself with a swift, kung-fu-like swing of its elbows.Perhaps most impressive is its ability to perform a 360-degree backflip from a standing position. Researchers claim the mini cheetah is designed to be &ldquo;virtually indestructible,&rdquo; recovering with little damage, even if a backflip ends in a spill.<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xNeZWP5Mx9s?&wmode=opaque" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable" style="width: 789px; height: 444px;"></iframe>MIT&#39;s new mini cheetah robot is the first four-legged robot to do a backflip. At only 20 pounds, the limber quadruped can bend and swing its legs wide, enabling it to walk either right side up or upside down. The robot can also trot over uneven terrain about twice as fast as an average person&#39;s walking speed. Video: Melanie Gonick/MIT In the event that a limb or motor does break, the mini cheetah is designed with modularity in mind: Each of the robot&rsquo;s legs is powered by three identical, low-cost electric motors that the researchers engineered using off-the-shelf parts. Each motor can easily be swapped out for a new one.&ldquo;You could put these parts together, almost like Legos,&rdquo; says lead developer Benjamin Katz, a technical associate in MIT&rsquo;s Department of Mechanical Engineering.The researchers will present the mini cheetah&rsquo;s design at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, in May. They are currently building more of the four-legged machines, aiming for a set of 10, each of which they hope to loan out to other labs.&ldquo;A big part of why we built this robot is that it makes it so easy to experiment and just try crazy things, because the robot is super robust and doesn&rsquo;t break easily, and if it does break, it&rsquo;s easy and not very expensive to fix,&rdquo; says Katz, who worked on the robot in the lab of Sangbae Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1586529356052-MIT-Mini-Cheetah-02.jpg">Lead developer Benjamin Katz, left, and co-author Jared Di Carlo, were inspired by a class they took last year, taught by EECS Professor Russ Tedrake, and set about programming the mini cheetah to perform a backflip. Photo: Bryce VickmarkKim says loaning mini cheetahs out to other research groups gives engineers an opportunity to test out novel algorithms and maneuvers on a highly dynamic robot, that they might not otherwise have access to.&ldquo;Eventually, I&rsquo;m hoping we could have a robotic dog race through an obstacle course, where each team controls a mini cheetah with different algorithms, and we can see which strategy is more effective,&rdquo; Kim says. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s how you accelerate research.&rdquo;<h2>&ldquo;Dynamic stuff&rdquo;</h2>The mini cheetah is more than just a miniature version of its predecessor, Cheetah 3, a large, heavy, formidable robot, which often needs to be stabilized with tethers to protect its expensive, custom-designed parts.&ldquo;In Cheetah 3, everything is super integrated, so if you want to change something, you have to do a ton of redesign,&rdquo; Katz says. &ldquo;Whereas with the mini cheetah, if you wanted to add another arm, you could just add three or four more of these modular motors.&rdquo;Katz came up with the electric motor design by reconfiguring the parts to small, commercially available motors normally used in drones and remote-controlled airplanes.Each of the robot&rsquo;s 12 motors is about the size of a Mason jar lid, and consists of: a stator, or set of coils, that generates a rotating magnetic field; a small controller that conveys the amount of current the stator should produce; a rotor, lined with magnets, that rotates with the stator&rsquo;s field, producing torque to lift or rotate a limb; a gearbox that provides a 6:1 gear reduction, enabling the rotor to provide six times the torque that it normally would; and a position sensor that measures the angle and orientation of the motor and associated limb.Each leg is powered by three motors, to give it three degrees of freedom and a huge range of motion. The lightweight, high-torque, low-inertia design enables the robot to execute fast, dynamic maneuvers and make high-force impacts on the ground without breaking gearboxes or limbs.&ldquo;The rate at which it can change forces on the ground is really fast,&rdquo; Katz says. &ldquo;When it&rsquo;s running, its feet are only on the ground for something like 150 milliseconds at a time, during which a computer tells it to increase the force on the foot, then change it to balance, and then decrease that force really fast to lift up. So it can do really dynamic stuff, like jump in the air with every step, or run with two feet on the ground at a time. Most robots aren&rsquo;t capable of doing this, so move much slower.&rdquo;<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1586529400132-MIT-Mini-Cheetah-03.jpg">Bejamin Katz came up with the mini cheetah&rsquo;s electric motor design by reconfiguring the parts to small, commercially available motors normally used in drones and remote-controlled airplanes. Photo: Bryce Vickmark<h2>Flipping out</h2>The engineers ran the mini cheetah through a number of maneuvers, first testing its running ability through the hallways of MIT&rsquo;s Pappalardo Lab and along the slightly uneven ground of Killian Court.In both environments, the quadruped bound along at about 5 miles per hour. The robot&rsquo;s joints are capable of spinning three times faster, with twice the amount of torque, and Katz estimates the robot could run about twice as fast with a little tuning.The team wrote another computer code to direct the robot to stretch and twist in various, yoga-like configurations, showcasting its range of motion and ability to rotate its limbs and joints while maintaining balance. They also programmed the robot to recover from an unexpected force, such as a kick to the side. When the researchers kicked the robot to the ground, it automatically shut down.&ldquo;It assumes something terrible has gone wrong, so it just turns off, and all the legs fly wherever they go,&rdquo; Katz says.When it receives a signal to restart, the robot first determines its orientation, then performs a preprogrammed crouch or elbow-swing maneuver to right itself on all fours.Katz and co-author Jared Di Carlo, an undergraduate in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), wondered whether the robot could take on even higher-impact maneuvers. Inspired by a class they took last year, taught by EECS Professor Russ Tedrake, they set about programming the mini cheetah to perform a backflip.&ldquo;We thought it would be a good test of robot performance, because it takes a lot of power, torque, and there are huge impacts at the end of a flip,&rdquo; Katz says.The team wrote a &ldquo;giant, nonlinear, offline trajectory optimizations&rdquo; that incorporated the robot&rsquo;s dynamics and actuator capabilities, and specified a trajectory in which the robot would start out in a certain, right-side-up orientation, and end up flipped 360 degrees. The program they developed then solved all the torques that needed to be applied to each joint, from each individual motor, and at every time period between start and end, in order to carry out the backflip.&ldquo;The first time we tried it, it miraculously worked,&rdquo; Katz says.&ldquo;This is super exciting,&rdquo; Kim adds. &ldquo;Imagine Cheetah 3 doing a backflip &mdash; it would crash and probably destroy the treadmill. We could do this with the mini cheetah on a desktop.&rdquo;The team is building about 10 more mini cheetahs, each of which they plan to loan out to collaborating groups, and Kim intends to form a mini cheetah research consortium of engineers, who can invent, swap, and even compete with new ideas.Meanwhile, the MIT team is developing another, even higher-impact maneuver.&ldquo;We&rsquo;re working now on a landing controller, the idea being that I want to be able to pick up the robot and toss it, and just have it land on its feet,&rdquo; Katz says. &ldquo;Say you wanted to throw the robot into the window of a building and have it go explore inside the building. You could do that.&rdquo;

MIT’s new mini cheetah robot is springy, light on its feet, and weighs in at just 20 pounds.  Photo: Bryce Vickmark

Robot’s lightweight, high-power design is the perfect platform to share and play, developers say.

Mini cheetah is the first four-legged robot to do a backflip

EPFL scientists are developing a three-legged robot for search and rescue missions that can crawl, roll, jump, and – like a Swiss Army knife – fold away into compact form, all on less power than your standard LED light.

Meet Tribot, the three-legged origami robot designed and built by EPFL scientists. Tri- for three legs and -bot for robot, this super-light critter fits in the palm of your hand, is cheap to build, runs on less than one watt of power, and may one day be deployed in mass for search and rescue mission

Meet Tribot, the Swiss Army knife of robots for rescue missions

<div data-wow-delay=".09s">A frenetic, hopping rodent is giving University of Michigan engineers new ways to think about and design two-legged robots.Biologists and engineers from U-M, Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego used information theory to, for the first time, quantify the entropy in an animal’s gait in three dimensions. The team’s findings, published in Nature Communications on Sept. 5, could help engineers make biomimetic robots that are tailored to specific environments.“This work points at a new way of building a robot that may be useful in navigating desert environments or desert planets,” said <a href="https://me.engin.umich.edu/people/faculty/ramanarayan-vasudevan" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Ram Vasudevan</a>, U-M assistant professor of mechanical engineering and a co-author of the paper. “We want to try and build robots that are capable of thriving in all sorts of environments.”He recalled a time when NASA’s wheeled Curiosity rover got stuck in the Martian desert.“It dug a deeper and deeper hole,” Vasudevan said. “What if they had taken a look at how these rodents travel through the desert? Evolution has found a suitable solution several times over. Until now, we haven’t appreciated how useful a system it is in this context.”<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/35MSBu7-mk0?&amp;wmode=opaque" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable" style="width: 800px; height: 421px;" frameborder="0"></iframe>The researchers explain their approach to studying the jerboa and its future applications to robotics. Video: Evan Dougherty, Michigan Engineering Communications &amp; Marketing.<div data-wow-delay=".09s">For biologists seeking to understand the ecological structure of animal communities, the findings also show how sudden changes in direction, gait and speed help the jerboa—a bipedal desert rodent—elude hungry predators and gain a competitive edge over their quadrupedal neighbors. The researchers compared the behavior of jerboas to jirds, which have four legs and are in the gerbil family.<h4>Entropy is the answer</h4>The jerboa is native to North Africa and Central Asia. Although bipedalism has evolved multiple times in rodents—including kangaroo rats and Australian hopping mice—jerboas are the only group to use three different gaits when moving on their long hind legs: hopping, skipping and running. They can leap more than half a meter high, which is about ten times their hip height.Talia Moore, a postdoctoral research fellow in the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, was tasked with characterizing the jerboa’s locomotion and comparing it to other bipedal animals.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1563294792374-jerboa-gif-5.gif" style="width: 766px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">IMAGE: &nbsp;In order to study a jerboa’s gait, the researchers had the rodent run laps around a track with a strategically placed high-speed camera and force plate. Credit: Talia Moore&nbsp;“When we put the jerboa on a force platform, every step had a different signature,” Moore said. “I thought, ‘This is so weird. It’s like they’re completely unpredictable and I’m unable to characterize it based on the techniques we have.’”She consulted with Vasudevan. “I said, ‘Ram, I wish there was a way to measure unpredictability,’” Moore recalls. “He said, ‘There is.’”They borrowed a metric of randomness from information theory—entropy. Entropy is a measure of the uncertainty of an outcome. With it, they developed a model that calculates the probability that the animal will move in a specific way.Moore and her colleagues suspected that these herky-jerky movements help jerboas foil an aerial predator’s efforts to calculate an intercept course.<h4>Jerboas vs. jirds in the wild and the lab</h4>Since they wanted to see how these animals behave in their natural habitat, they traveled to northwestern China and designed a novel set of field experiments to study whether jirds and jerboas escape predators in different ways.Combining their observations and their new model, they found that the jerboas were much more unpredictable than the jirds. Their maneuvers included momentary bursts of acceleration, kangaroo-like hopping, erratic zigzagging and acrobatic leaps.To test whether the jerboa’s unpredictability truly corresponds to increased predator-evasion success, the researchers performed behavioral experiments that measured the animals’ tendency to seek shelter, which is called thigmotaxis.Small foraging animals face a conflict between their needs to venture out for food and to stay under cover—to avoid becoming food. Due to this conflict, the amount of time an animal spends in an open area varies with its ability to evade predators. As evasiveness increases, the behavioral affinity to shelter, and so-called “open-field anxiety,” decrease.During simulated predation trials, Moore and her colleagues observed that the bipedal jerboas explored the entire experimental enclosure, while jirds tended to remain near the walled periphery. She performed a second experiment in the lab with captive-bred animals that had never seen predators before. The results from both experiments suggest that bipedalism in rodents is associated with lower thigmotaxis and greater predator evasion in open settings.<h4>Why this matters for robotics</h4>Much of the research into robot locomotion involves smooth movement in low-variability environments. But these findings demonstrate some of the limits to that perspective.For biomimetic robots to interact with the world, we’ll need to engineer unpredictability in motion.<cite>Talia Moore</cite><div data-wow-delay=".09s">“The key insight here is it’s a big engineering challenge to engineer unpredictability this has shown that it’s a worthwhile pursuit,” Vasudevan said.Added Moore, “If we want to make more biomimetic robots that interact with the world around us, we’re going to need to think about how to engineer unpredictability in motion.”The paper is titled “Unpredictability of escape trajectory explains predator 2 evasion ability and microhabitat preference of desert rodents.” Co-authors in addition to Moore and Vasudevan are Kimberly L. Cooper of the University of California, San Diego, and Andrew A. Biewener of Harvard University. The study was funded in part by a Chapman Memorial Scholarship to Moore.</div> </div></div>

IMAGE:  The jerboa - a bipedal desert rodent native to North Africa and Central Asia. Credit: Christian Baker

How a hopping mouse and information theory could inform robotic locomotion.

From rodent to robot

Unitree Robotics

READY Robotics-Fri Jun 30 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0200 (Central European Summer Time)

READY Robotics-Mon Jul 31 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)

READY Robotics-Thu Aug 31 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)

READY Robotics-Thu Aug 31 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0200 (Central European Summer Time)

READY Robotics-Sat Sep 30 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)

READY Robotics

DEEP Robotics

University of Michigan-Fri Jun 30 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0200 (Central European Summer Time)

University of Michigan-Mon Jul 31 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)

University of Michigan-Thu Aug 31 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)

University of Michigan-Thu Aug 31 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0200 (Central European Summer Time)

University of Michigan-Sat Sep 30 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)

Rozum Robotics-Fri Jun 30 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0200 (Central European Summer Time)

Rozum Robotics-Mon Jul 31 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)

Rozum Robotics-Thu Aug 31 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)

Rozum Robotics-Thu Aug 31 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0200 (Central European Summer Time)

Rozum Robotics-Sat Sep 30 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)

Rozum Robotics

Adapta Robotics-Fri Jun 30 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0200 (Central European Summer Time)

Adapta Robotics-Mon Jul 31 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)

Adapta Robotics-Thu Aug 31 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)

Adapta Robotics-Thu Aug 31 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0200 (Central European Summer Time)

Adapta Robotics-Sat Sep 30 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)

Accerion-Fri Jun 30 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0200 (Central European Summer Time)

Accerion-Mon Jul 31 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)

Accerion-Thu Aug 31 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)

Accerion-Thu Aug 31 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0200 (Central European Summer Time)

Accerion-Sat Sep 30 2023 23:59:59 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)

Canonical

jumping robots

jumping robots

Profiles