The team reached to the exclusion of terrain with large and small Legged Robots

Humans, robots, and anything else with legs can-have problems with this rough terrain mobility, sticky or slippery. Navigate dangerous ground: such as this is Not Necessarily a problem, as long there is a bit of advanced warning as. Imagine the Difference between walking out on the sidewalk and ice That You Would expect, INSTEAD of walking outside on the sidewalk and ice do not expect That You.

Difficult Thing Is That the "expected" bit: Actually short of stepping on the floor, how do you know what to expect? A robot can try to Rely on sensors to Identify and Avoid the slippery field goal cam Researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and ETH Zurich with Another effective strategy, All which offert last week in the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) .

The strategy Consists in the use of teams of robots and send Reviews some of 'em by others, to see if They slip and fall. This approach can get expensive, but if you are using a non-homogeneous group: one big expensive robot That you care, with a Range of cheap little robots not do That, as a picket line of scouting the terrain. Here's a video Demonstrating the concept:



You May Recognize all of the robots in this video: the big one is the ETH Zurich StarlETH quadrupeds, while the little one is VelociRoACH, from the University of California at Berkeley. Work is VelociRoACH jog forward from StarlETH, and explores the terrain. StarlETH visual brand watches on the back VelociRoACH to learn how to do a little robot, and aussi Sends data VelociRoACH IMU.

Together, the robots are ble to classify the terrain or slippery Either safe to walk on with an accuracy of more than 90 percent, and since StarlETH ble to localize VelociRoACH as scampers around, StarlETH knows Exactly where is (or is not) safe to move .

Danger Is That You-have here the poor little robot scout might end up stumbling on a piece of land so dangerous That Is That It gets stuck in it. This is the best of Android basic getting stuck (and the robot scout still Accomplish What Was Intended to be Achieved through a primary risk warning Android) goal you-have to be willing to look at thesis Scout robots consuming, and this is why is VelociRoACH a robot of choice, as it is mostly made ​​of cardboard, and you can just toss a handful more in the mix to replace Any robots That Could be lost.

While the video above shows a demo with only one robot scout, using multiple robots Will Be more effective. Since they're cheap, and there's no reason not to use a lot of 'em. And work experience in the future with the formations of robots sit for the appointment of more efficient broad tracts of land are Potentially dangerous.

Oh, and The Most Potentially dangerous terrain of everything? Right under the foot StarlETH, at least as far as is Concerned VelociRoACH.



Fortunately, not cheap VelociRoACH only, as he Said lead author Duncan Haldane us as it's sustainable, "After VelociRoACH got stepped on, and we just managed That Kept it off and no problems."

And feet "to reveal the slippery terrain with a team of heterogeneous robots Legged" by W. Duncan Haldane, Peter Fankhauser, Roland Siegwart, and Ronald S. Fearing, of the University of California at Berkeley and ETH Zurich, last week at ICRA 2014 in Hong Kong.

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