Research / Tensegrity Robotics
Research / Tensegrity Robotics |
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Biological
locomotion displays a high degree of fault tolerance to physical damage.
However, robotic locomotion does not share the same characteristic, and is in
contrast highly sensitive to mechanical damage. One reason for this difference
lies in the mechanical design and control philosophy of modern robots, which is
usually based on the idea of a single actuator controlling a single degree of
freedom. In contrast, this paper seeks to explore a new paradigm in the design
of locomotor robots based on the concept of tensegrity, which enables the
development of highly redundant mechanical structures. Actuation of such a
structure at one location affects multiple degrees of freedom, and can thus
enable a high degree of fault tolerant control. The goal of this work was to
investigate the possibility for locomotion in tensegrity based robots, and
evaluate the ability for fault tolerant locomotion. The results show that
tensegrity robots can provide a suitable platform for locomotion, and show a
considerable degree of fault tolerance.
Publications
Paul C., Lipson H., Valero Cuevas F. J. (2005) , "Design of Tensegrity Robots for Fault Tolerant Locomotion" Proceedings of 12th International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR), Seattle, Washington, USA, July 18th-20th, to appear.
Paul C., Lipson H., Valero Cuevas F. J. (2005) ,"Evolutionary Form-Finding of Tensegrity Structures" Proceedings of the 2005 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, June 2005, Washington D.C., USA to appear.
In collaboration with The neuromuscular biomechanics laboratory
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