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  4. Steerable Locomotion Controller for Six-strut Icosahedral Tensegrity Robots
 
conference paper

Steerable Locomotion Controller for Six-strut Icosahedral Tensegrity Robots

Vespignani, Massimo
•
Ercolani, Chiara  
•
Friesen, Jeffrey M.
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2018
2018 Ieee/Rsj International Conference On Intelligent Robots And Systems (Iros)
2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

This paper proposes a novel steerable locomotion controller for six-strut tensegrity robots. Tensegrity robots are lightweight and have many promising features such as robustness, shape-shifting capabilities, and deployability, making them good candidates for exploration and scouting of remote areas. Despite these advantages, tensegrity robots are challenging to control due to their large number of degrees of freedom, nonlinear dynamics, and intrinsic compliance. Recently, many step-wise motion controllers have been employed to simplify the locomotion problem, thanks to the discrete nature of the tensegrity structure. In this paper we present a novel locomotion controller which will steer the direction of motion of a six-strut tensegrity robot when used in conjunction with any preexisting step-wise controller. We validated our controller on the SUPERball v2 robot, showing straight and curved trajectories, and an example of navigation around obstacles. Our method is computationally inexpensive, only requires knowledge about the current base triangle (e.g, via accelerometer data), and can be generalized to any six-strut tensegrity robot which can perform step-wise locomotion.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1109/IROS.2018.8593676
Web of Science ID

WOS:000458872702106

Author(s)
Vespignani, Massimo
Ercolani, Chiara  
Friesen, Jeffrey M.
Bruce, Jonathan
Date Issued

2018

Published in
2018 Ieee/Rsj International Conference On Intelligent Robots And Systems (Iros)
Total of pages

7

Start page

2886

End page

2892

Subjects

Robot kinematics

•

NASA

•

Robot sensing systems

•

Navigation

•

SUPERball v2 robot

•

tensegrity structure

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

OTHER

EPFL units
IIE  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

Madrid, Spain

October 1-5, 2018

Available on Infoscience
March 27, 2019
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/155770
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