Durham, North Carolina – A robot Which is being developed at Duke University is almost ready to take on the world in any direction.
Instead of trying to copy identical shapes from nature by building robots that look like… Like peopleWhether it’s dogs or insects, engineering professor Boyuan Chen and his team focused on uniformity in action, or what he calls “dynamic symmetry.”
The result was Argus. The stocky robot named after a mythical multi-eyed giant has depth-sensing cameras attached to 20 overlapping legs radiating from a central core. With no front, back, top or bottom, he can see and move in any direction instantly.
“Instead of measuring how your legs are arranged around a different part of your body, we measure how fast you can move in any direction,” Chen said. “Who said, you know, if you have a robot to help us in the most effective way, it has to look like us?”
In experiments, the Argus was able to navigate sandy beaches and forest trees, rolling over obstacles and stabilizing itself after being pushed. It can climb between parallel brick walls by alternating pushing and shoving movements with its legs. If one or more motors die or one of its legs breaks, it continues to operate.
“Watching Argus move is different from watching any other robot we’ve worked with,” said Jiaxun Liu, a graduate student and co-author of a study on Argus published online Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics. “The first time we saw it navigate trees and rough terrain, even with heavy impacts, we knew this was something different.”
As part of their work, the researchers developed a new design principle called dynamic isotopes that ranks robots on a scale from 0 to 1 based on how well they can accelerate uniformly in every direction. Most robots in use today, including robots and drones, score less than 0.6. Argus scores 0.91.
“When a robot can accelerate equally in every direction, it stops needing to face the world in any particular way,” said Chen, who hopes the same principle can guide robotics development. Search and rescue robotsOr aerial or underwater vehicles, or robots that have the ability to grab objects.
“Instead of building a robotic hand that looks like a human hand… one idea is to think about making the Argus the hand itself, and it can manipulate objects in any direction,” he said. “The knowledge we can transfer to the rest of the world is much deeper than building an existing robot or imitating an existing species.”
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Ramer reported from Concord, New Hampshire.