Human-engineered facilities (e.g. power plants, refineries, chemical plants, nuclear facilities etc.) form complicated, unstructured, and dynamically changing ecosystems, which can pose a significant risk to human health and safety. Robots have the potential to assist, augment or replace humans in the performance of inspection, upgrade and maintenance operations as well as in emergency and rescue scenarios.
The complexity of these domains means easy movement within the facilities can be problematic, but humans and animals move across varying terrains easily, changing their gait, behaviours and motions, while performing simple and complex tasks involving coordination of the arms, body and legs.
Recent years have seen a rapidly growing interest in humanoids, in particular, for operation in these facilities. But they do not form the only legged configuration and maybe they are not always the best?
At the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), research over many years has led to the development of a wide range of legged mechatronic systems designed with a focus on operation in extreme (and sometimes not so extreme) sites. Robots developed at IIT include: the HyQ quadruped family, humanoids such as iCub, cCub, COMAN, WALKMAN, and COMAN+, and the centaur robot PHOLUS.
This presentation will explore the important features of legged robots, and particularly, robots for combined locomotion/manipulation. It will study aspects of the robot design, actuation, power and energy efficiency, motion and locomotion control, gait generation, perception, sensing, etc. From this I shall try to provide pointers for systems that could start to replicate human/animal inspired agility, compliance, dexterity, robustness, reliability and large scale movement/locomotion (loco-manipulation).