Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
This paper presents the results of a study on the exploitation of compliance in structures made of self-reconfigurable modular robots - Roombots. This research was driven by the following three hypotheses: (1) compliance can improve locomotion performance; (2) different types of compliance will result in diverse locomotion behaviors; (3) control parameters optimized for a medium level of compliance will perform better for other values of compliance than parameters optimized for extremal compliance. Two types of in-series compliant elements were tested, with five different stiffness values for each of them, on a structure made of two Roombots modules. We ran dedicated on-line locomotion parameter optimizations for six different configurations and evaluated their performance for different stiffness values. Hypothesis 1 was confirmed for both types of compliant elements, with a peak of performance for an optimal level of compliance. The variety of locomotion strategies obtained for the different structures confirms hypothesis 2. Hypothesis 3 was only partially confirmed.
Loading
Loading
Loading
Loading
Loading
Stéphane Bonardi, Auke Ijspeert, Rico Möckel, Soha Pouya, Alexander Spröwitz, Massimo Vespignani
Stéphane Bonardi, Auke Ijspeert, Emmanuel Senft, Massimo Vespignani
Stéphane Bonardi, Auke Ijspeert, Soha Pouya, Jesse van den Kieboom, Massimo Vespignani