Extreme Terrain Quadruped (ET-Quad)
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The Extreme Terrain Quadruped (ET-Quad) robot is the world’s first legged robot capable of running, vertical climbing, and swimming in water.
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Running in Fluids
/In nature, animals often walk or run through various types of resistive media, such as water, snow, or even tall grass. Most controllers treat these types of media as a disturbance, and ignore the fundamental properties of the terrain legged robots walk on. This project is developing modeling and control approaches to account for resistive media in robot controllers and develop appropriate locomotion strategies that are informed by physics.
Read MoreUS Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Assessment of Energy-Efficient and Model-Based Control
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Human-robot interaction in the Army is a growing field of interest as robots increase their capability to work with soldiers in the field. The skid-steered vehicle HUSKY navigates several outdoors terrains equipped with different motion planners to compare the energy efficiency of terrain traversal with a minimum-distance algorithm versus an energy-efficient one, with or without learning terrain kinematic and friction parameters.
Read MoreSound Identification for Fire-Fighting Mobile Robots
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In a burning building prone to collapsing at any second, time is of the essence. The lives of firefighters and the people and animals they rescue grow more endangered by the second. A fire-fighting robot with the capability to “hear” and recognize sounds of distress or danger inside site would help firefighters navigate dangerous terrain and find victims at lower risk of human casualties.
Read MoreCost Optimal Control of Microgrids Having Solar Power and Energy Storage
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The renewability and employment benefits of solar energy is waylaid by its inherently variable availability dependent on time of day, location, and weather. An energy storage system (ESS) is needed to provide consistently continuous electricity. Advanced Optimal Resource Allocation (AORA) uses predictions of this availability and real-time price of and levelized costs of energy to optimize the combined use of grid power, solar power, and the ESS for significant cost savings.
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