Undergraduate research project: Toy Climbing Robot
From RobotLab
Researchers: Bell and Balkcom
Research description
We built a simple toy climbing robot in order to explore problems related to grasping, path planning, and robot control. The robot is capable of climbing a wall of pegs either under remote control, or on the basis of a set of pre-recorded keyframes. In addition, the robot can climb certain peg configurations using a cyclic gait. All communications are sent through an infrared connection, and the tether to the robot consists only of two power wires. Due to the minimalist, non-prehensile grasping method the robot is capable of actively removing error while climbing, which is necessary to enable the robot to climb open-loop in the absence of environmental sensing.
Publications
- M. Bell, D. Balkcom. "A toy climbing robot". IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2006), May 2006.
- M. Bell. A toy rock climbing robot. Senior Honors Thesis, Dartmouth College; D. Balkcom, advisor. Published as Dartmouth CS TR 2005-542, August 2005.
Videos
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QuickTime video of Matt Bell's robot climbing in real time. (39MB) |
