Army Researchers Developing Self-righting for Robots

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Kessens' work is fairly math intensive. His software is meant to develop solutions for any robot. But to do that, he first needs to provide to it specific information about the robot. He needs to take into account the size and weight of the robot, how many arms it has, its wheels and flippers, and how mass is distributed on the robot. If it has a mechanical arm, the software must know how long each segment of that arm is, how much the arm weighs, and if the weight of the arm is at the base, near the robot's body, or if it is at the end of the arm.

Each moving part on a particular robot, he said, could potentially be moved or manipulated in a way that helps the robot right itself.

On a robot with an arm, for instance, moving that arm in one direction could create the momentum needed to flip it back over. But that only works if there is enough weight on the end of that arm, if the arm is of the right length, and if the arm is moved quickly enough - and stopped quickly enough.

"If I use a dynamic motion, where I drop the mass quickly and then make it stop suddenly, now we are injecting momentum into the system and we can use the momentum to make the robot right itself," he said. "It's a total physics problem."

Within the "Autonomous Systems Division" and within ARL, Kessens said, researchers are working to "transform tools into teammates."

"We want to take these robots and give them enough autonomy that they act more like a well-trained dog, where the Soldier can send the robot on a mission where it operates on its own for a couple of minutes, where the Soldier doesn't have to manage every joint motion and every single activity that the robot is doing," he said.

If robots can be provided with a "higher level of cognitive ability," he said, then instead of multiple Soldiers needing to deploy and operate and retrieve robots, "maybe we can flip that ratio and have one Soldier command four robots, where each of those robots is doing something, and it acts more like a teammate."

Kessens said that kind of relationship between a team of Soldiers and the tools they use is "a ways down the line. But self-righting is one technology that is a part of that, one step toward that vision. We want to give Soldiers a robot that has more self-reliance."

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