PPT Slide
“Behold Behemoth ... His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like bars of iron.” -Job 40.18
Today’s robots are designed with conventional, rigid components and they are controlled for precise end-point position and force control. While their performance in constrained environments far exceeds any living organism’s, they cannot function in unconstrained environments as well as the simplest of animals. This research is aimed at developing a new class of biologically inspired robots that exhibit much greater robustness in performance in unstructured environments than today's robots. It encompasses multiple researchers in multi-disciplinary fields.
The main ideas we are pursuing are:
Use novel layered prototyping methods to create compliant biomimetic structures with embedded sensors and actuators (Cutkosky, Kenny, Full)
Develop biomimetic actuation and control schemes that exploit “preflexes” and reflexes for robust locomotion and manipulation (Kazerooni, Howe, Shadmehr, Cutkosky)
Figure 1. Examples of small linkages. Notice the complexity and the amount of space used by fasteners