Lunacity seems to be lunacy, or at least fantasy. “Personal jetpacks” are at the edge of possibility, requiring impractically huge amounts of power to lift a person (and, once lifted, are impossible to control). But that doesn’t mean that moderate sized personal jetpacks have no possible use.
Two recent projects illustrate how copter tech can be combined with articulated bodies to create interesting hybrid robots.
One interesting concept is to add ducted fans to the feet of a bipedal (or any number of pedal) robot. The lift is used to aid the robot when it needs to stretch for a long step over a gap. The video makes this idea pretty clear: one foot is anchored, and the other uses the thrust to keep balanced while stepping over the void.
This is the “Lunacity” idea applied to each foot independently, and it is plausible (if noisy and annoying). There isn’t much hope of lifting the whole robot, but the thrusters probably can add useful “weightlessness” to parts of the robot. In this case, the feet, but the same idea might add lifting power to arms or sensor stalks.
A second project sort of goes the other way; adding a light weigh, foldable “origami” arm to a flying UAV [2]. The idea is to have a compact arm that extends the capabilities of the flyer, within the weight and space limits of a small aircraft. The design unfolds and folds with only a single motor. Origami is so cool!
Instead of adding lifters to the robot, the robot arm is added to the flyer, to make a hybrid flying grasper. I think there is no reason why there couldn’t be two arms, or the arms can’t be legs, or some other combination.
I look forward to even more creative hybridization, combining controllable rigid structures with lifting bodies in transformer-like multimode robots.
- Evan Ackerman, Bipedal Robot Uses Jet-Powered Feet to Step Over Large Gaps, in IEEE Spectrum – robotis. 2018. https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/bipedal-robot-uses-jetpowered-feet-to-step-over-large-gaps
- Suk-Jun Kim, Dae-Young Lee, Gwang-Pil Jung, and Kyu-Jin Cho, An origami-inspired, self-locking robotic arm that can be folded flat. Science Robotics, 3 (16) 2018. http://robotics.sciencemag.org/content/3/16/eaar2915.abstract
Robot Wednesday
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