Towards robust and autonomous locomotion in cluttered terrain using insect-scale robots (Talk)

Animals such as mice, cockroaches and spiders have the remarkable ability to maneuver through challenging cluttered natural terrain and have been inspiration for adaptable legged robotic systems. Recent biological research further indicates that body reorientation along pathways of minimal energy is a key factor influencing such locomotion. We propose to extend this idea by hypothesizing that body compliance of soft bodied animals and robots might be an alternate yet effective locomotion strategy to squeeze through cluttered obstacles. We present some early results related to the above using Compliant Legged Autonomous Robotic Insect (CLARI), our novel, insect-scale, origami-based quadrupedal robot. While the distributed compliance of such soft-legged robots enables them to explore complex environments, their gait design, control, and motion planning is often challenging due to a large number of unactuated/underactuated degrees of freedom. Towards addressing this issue, we present a geometric motion planning framework for autonomous, closed kinematic chain articulated systems that is computationally effective and has a promising potential for onboard and real-time gait generation.