Specialized robots that can both fly and drive typically touch down on land before attempting to transform and drive away.
Specialized robots that can both fly and drive typically touch down on land before attempting to transform and drive away. But when the landing terrain is rough, these robots sometimes get stuck and are unable to continue operating. Now a team of Caltech engineers has developed a real-life Transformer that has the "brains" to morph in midair, allowing the dronelike robot to smoothly roll away and begin its ground operations without pause. The increased agility and robustness of such robots could be particularly useful for commercial delivery systems and robotic explorers.
The new robot, dubbed ATMO (aerially transforming morphobot), uses four thrusters to fly, but the shrouds that protect them become the system's wheels in an alternative driving configuration. The whole transformation relies on a single motor to move a central joint that lifts ATMO's thrusters up into drone mode or down into drive mode.
The researchers describe the robot and the sophisticated control system that drives it in a paper recently published in the journal Communications Engineering.
Read more at California Institute of Technology
Image: The ATMO (aerially transforming morphobot) robot transforms from its flying, quadrotor configuration midair as it approaches the ground. It is then able to roll away in its driving configuration. Caltech researchers developed a sophisticated control system for ATMO that uses an advanced control method called model predictive control, which works by continuously predicting how the system will behave in the near future and adjusting its actions to stay on course. (Credit: Ioannis Mandralis/Communications Engineering)
