Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot (M4) with appendage repurposing for locomotion plasticity enhancement
Abstract
Robot designs can take many inspirations from nature, where there are many examples of highly resilient and fault-tolerant locomotion strategies to navigate complex terrains by recruiting multi-functional appendages. For example, birds such as Chukars and Hoatzins can repurpose wings for quadrupedal walking and wing-assisted incline running. These animals showcase impressive dexterity in employing the same appendages in different ways and generating multiple modes of locomotion, resulting in highly plastic locomotion traits which enable them to interact and navigate various environments and expand their habitat range. The robotic biomimicry of animals' appendage repurposing can yield mobile robots with unparalleled capabilities. Taking inspiration from animals, we have designed a robot capable of negotiating unstructured, multi-substrate environments, including land and air, by employing its components in different ways as wheels, thrusters, and legs. This robot is called the Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot, or M4 in short. M4 can employ its multi-functional components composed of several actuator types to (1) fly, (2) roll, (3) crawl, (4) crouch, (5) balance, (6) tumble, (7) scout, and (8) loco-manipulate. M4 can traverse steep slopes of up to 45 deg. and rough terrains with large obstacles when in balancing mode. M4 possesses onboard computers and sensors and can autonomously employ its modes to negotiate an unstructured environment. We present the design of M4 and several experiments showcasing its multi-modal capabilities.
Additional Information
© The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This project is funded by Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A.R. efforts were partly funded by an NSF Foundational Research in Robotics (FRR), Award # 2142519, and a JPL Faculty Research Program (JFRP) fund. We acknowledge the work of graduate students and engineers at Caltech and Northeastern University for their help in prototyping and testing M4. Specifically, we are thankful to Dr. Milad Ramezani at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and Filip Slezak from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) for their help with autonomous multi-modal UAS-UGV operations. Noel Esparza-Duran supported the prototyping of M4. Benjamin Mottis from EPFL helped with preliminary path planning simulations and experiments. Contributions. E.S. led the prototyping efforts, simulations, and experimentation. E.S. and A.R. collaboratively wrote the draft. A.K. evaluated the presented multi-modal models. R.N. supported prototyping efforts. A.K. and M.G. helped with draft editing. A.R. and M.G. conceived the M4 idea and are the principal investigators. Data availability. Data will be provided upon request. Code availability. Simulation and path planning codes will be provided upon request. The authors declare no competing interests.Attached Files
Published - s41467-023-39018-y.pdf
Supplemental Material - 41467_2023_39018_MOESM10_ESM.mp4
Supplemental Material - 41467_2023_39018_MOESM1_ESM.pdf
Supplemental Material - 41467_2023_39018_MOESM3_ESM.pdf
Supplemental Material - 41467_2023_39018_MOESM4_ESM.mp4
Supplemental Material - 41467_2023_39018_MOESM5_ESM.mp4
Supplemental Material - 41467_2023_39018_MOESM6_ESM.mp4
Supplemental Material - 41467_2023_39018_MOESM7_ESM.mp4
Supplemental Material - 41467_2023_39018_MOESM8_ESM.mp4
Supplemental Material - 41467_2023_39018_MOESM9_ESM.mp4
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC10300070
- Eprint ID
- 122006
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20230628-295324000.2
- JPL/Caltech
- NSF
- CMMI-2142519
- JPL Faculty Research Program
- Created
-
2023-06-28Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2023-07-26Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST), GALCIT