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CSE graduate student builds new tumbling robot

June 24, 2008

Picture of Brett Hemes with robot parts

CSE graduate student Brett Hemes recently finished work on a new tumbling robot as a result of his work with CSE professor Nikos Papanikolopoulos. The robot serves as a tool to demonstrate and test his research, aimed at producing generalized methods for controlling and designing tumbling robots. He demonstrated the robot at a workshop with representatives for the National Science Foundation and members of industry, hosted in the Digital Technology Center.

The robot can maneuver over challenging terrain, such as woodchips and pebbles, without getting stuck, because the body plays an active role in movement and provides capabilities not found in traditional robotic designs. The robot has a flat, triangle-shaped body and two legs it uses to lift itself out of the way of obstacles. CSE graduate student Duc Fehr co-authored a paper on the topic with Hemes, entitled “Motion Primitives for a Tumbling Robot,” which describes a method for discretizing the motion of tumbling robots into smaller pieces that are useful for motion planning. Their paper was accepted to the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems to be held September 22-26 in Nice, France. For more information about CSE robotics work, visit CSE robots.