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Scorpio: a Biomimetic Reconfigurable Rolling–Crawling Robot

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Scorpio: a Biomimetic Reconfigurable Rolling–Crawling Robot Research Article International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems September-October 2016: 1–16 Scorpio: A biomimetic reconfigurable ª The Author(s) 2016 DOI: 10.1177/1729881416658180 rolling–crawling robot arx.sagepub.com Ning Tan, Rajesh Elara Mohan, and Karthikeyan Elangovan Abstract This paper presents the bio-inspired design, realization, and validation of a reconfigurable rolling–crawling robot. The developed platform is able to mimic Cebrennus rechenbergi, a species of huntsman spider which can crawl and roll using only its legs. Mechanical design, control architecture, and actuator selection strategies targeting platform miniaturization are pre- sented in detail. The navigating and autonomous capabilities of the robot are examined in two facets: (1) recovery behaviors where a robot in a previously unknown state after a fall recovers autonomously to a known standing gait state using Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU); and (2) terrain perception where the robot is capable of autonomously assessing the characteristics of the terrain and chooses the appropriate morphology and locomotion mode in relation to the perceived terrain. Keywords Biomimetics, robotic spider, reconfigurable robotics, autonomous system Date received: 20 April 2016; accepted: 21 May 2016 Topic: Special Issue - Manipulators and Mobile Robots Topic Editor: Michal Kelemen Introduction from their natural counterparts.6–8 Li et al.9 addressed the control problem of the trotting gait of a quadruped robot with Compared to industrial robots that are usually stationary, 10 bionic springy legs. Ho et al. presented the design and mobile robots are not fixed to one physical location and have 1 prototype of a small quadruped robot whose walking motion the capability to move around in their environment. This is realized by two piezocomposite actuators. The design of enables them to undertake a wide variety of tasks and appli- the legsis inspiredby the leg configurationof insects. Inspired cation scenarios involving larger degrees of freedom (DOF). by turtles, an amphibious robot was designed with a spherical Such robots typically use legs, wheels, or tracks to navigate 11 12 body and four legs with two DOF. In Chen et al., acom- from one place to another. Meanwhile, for the purposes of pliant leg mechanism was proposed for a small six-legged adapting to different terrains, additional locomotion gaits robot based on abstracted anatomy from insect legs. Since leg such as climbing, jumping, swimming, and rolling are also mechanisms are suitable for crossing natural rough terrain realized as well. Climbing is used to reach different height (like rocks, grass, mulch, etc.) and ruins (after earthquake levels. Jumping is energy-efficient and able to get past obsta- or fire), these robots are highly desired for numerous appli- cles of higher than double their leg length.2 Swimming is used cations including search, rescue, reconnaissance, and surveil- to cross over water areas and undertake tasks underwater.3 lance missions. Rollingisefficientformovingonsmoothterrainswhereless energy is consumed and faster speeds can be achieved.4 The design of mobile robots can usually be inspired by the morphology of biological species from nature.5 A vast Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore majority of animals realize locomotion by using legs, Corresponding author: because leg mechanisms are dexterous to adapt to different Ning Tan, Singapore University of Technology and Design, 8 Somapah roughnesses of terrains and robust over a wide range of Road, Singapore, 487372 Singapore. terrains. The design of robots profits from the inspiration Email: [email protected] Creative Commons CC-BY: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/ open-access-at-sage). 2 International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems Reconfigurability opens another possible method of mobility for mobile robots.13 Numerous attempts have been made previously towards realizing reconfigurable robotic platforms that are capable of locomotion gaits beyond crawling with special design. Trapezoidal wave locomotion was realized by a reconfigurable caterpillar robot.14 Nansai et al. proposed a reconfigurable leg based on the Theo Jansen mechanism.15 By changing the length of the links with motors, the leg can generate different gaits with only one driving motor. Nemoto et al.16 developed a mathemat- ical model for the rolling locomotion of a kind of wheel spider which can be found in the Namib Desert of Southern Africa, and the control of the robotic counterpart was pre- sented based on an energy consumption approach17 to con- trol the rolling locomotion on the horizontal plane with a Figure 1. Cebrennus rechenbergi, also known as the Moroccan flic- 18 hexapod robot. Chen et al. proposed a leg-wheel trans- flac spider, is a species of huntsman spider indigenous to Mor- formable mobile robot. Miniature jumping robots with leg- occo.23 Credit: Peter Ja¨ger / Ingo Rechenberg. hopping and rolling capabilities had been proposed in Armour et al.2 A preliminary attempt to solve the terrain Sahara Desert.23 The rolling locomotion of such spiders was perception issue of reconfigurable legged robots was pre- discovered by Ingo Rechenberg from TU Berlin. The robot sented in Sinha et al.19 Chadil et al.20 presented a reconfi- to be discussed in this paper is inspired by the special mor- gurable spherical robot that can be reconfigured into a form phology of this huntsman spider.24 of two interconnected hemispheres with three legs equipped Normally the spider crawls with eight legs. However, if with omni-directional wheels. A quadruped robot based on provoked or threatened by an external stimulus, the spider can modularized electrical paddle modules was designed,21 escape by doubling its normal crawling speed using forward or which could achieve both legged and wheeled locomotion. backward flips similar to acrobatic flic-flac movements used However, most of the works on reconfigurable legged robots by gymnasts with the use of its eight legs simultaneously.25 tend to use additional mechanisms to realize multiple locomo- This spider of interest somersaults to move independently from tion gaits. Such an approach would result in redundant mechan- surrounding conditions, which means that it does not need a isms resulting in increased size, high level of computational slope to initiate the rolling process by using the gravitational complexity, and numerous controllability hurdles. A better force, or does not need to walk a little first, or perform a startup solution to this problem would be to use a single mechanism gesture to trigger the rolling locomotion. Figure 2 shows the to realize multiple locomotion gaits through reconfiguration. somersault sequence generated by the spider in rolling mode. As a substantial extension and elaboration of our previous The spider lands on its legs and triggers a new jump. work,22 here we present a novel class of self-reconfigurable So far, it could also be observed that only for certain stimuli, architecture called Scorpio that uses only legs to produce the spider starts to switch from a normal crawling locomotion crawling, rolling, and climbing locomotion as a means of tra- to this unique rolling locomotion in a somersaulting manner. versing highly complex unstructured terrains. The proposed Such stimuli includes the appearance of a predator, for exam- robot is inspired by a recently discovered Cebrennus rechen- ple, the fennec fox and sand cat, or meeting a conspecific. But it bergi from the family of huntsman spiders. The rest of the has not been researched that whether the sex of the conspecific paper is organized as follows. ‘‘sec.bio’’ introduces the inspira- plays a role or not. Additionally, the circumstances when the tion of the research. ‘‘sec.str’’ presents the mechanical design spider makes use of the rolling locomotion, for instance, to of the robot in detail. The control system including hardware change positions, to hunt down its prey, or to search for its and software is presented in ‘‘sec.con.’’ ‘‘sec.exp’’ reports on tunnel, could not be observed either unfortunately. the experimental validation of gait generation and transforma- This led to the opening of a new field in robotics. Ralf tion, automated recovery, and reconfiguration with perception Simon King24 analyzed the leg movement of the rolling capability. Finally ‘‘sec.concl’’ concludes the paper. spider in great detail with the help of video footage and prototyped a bi-locomotional biomimetically inspired quadruped, BiLBIQ, using ROBOTIS BIOLOID. How- Bio-inspiration ever, there are still several major issues to be solved: Normally a spider walks on eight legs. However, a recently discovered species of spider called Cebrennus rechenbergi the perceptual and autonomous capabilities; (shown in Figure 1, also called the Moroccan flic-flac spi- design optimization targeting robot platform der) can also roll with the use of its eight legs. The habitat miniaturization; of Cebrennus rechenbergi is the sand dunes of the Erg study of user-friendly interface design for a shape Chebbi desert in Southern Morocco—the boundary to the shifting rolling–crawling robot. Tan et al. 3 Figure 2. Subfigures (a) to (h) taken from the somersault sequence. Huntsman spider (Cebrennus rechenbergi) is in rolling mode, lands on its legs, and triggers a new jump.23 Credit: Peter Ja¨ger/Ingo Rechenberg. Our work presented in the following sections focuses on Table 1. Specifications of the mechanical property of Scorpio. tackling these issues. PLA (Poly lactic acid Full body material or Polyclactide) Structural design Diameter (while rolling) in mm 168 mm Mechanical design and prototyping L  W  H (while walking) in mm 230 mm  230 mm  175 mm Weight (Full weight) in gram 430 grams Our goal in this project is to develop a Cebrennus rechen- bergi inspired robot that is capable of crawling and rolling.
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