Unconventional locomotion: hopping, leaping, and disentangling

Legged robots show great promise in areas where other robotic platforms struggle, like cluttered natural or indoor environments. Novel robot morphology developed in concert with control can improve robot performance in metrics like speed, efficiency, or power and enable legged robots to tackle new challenging environments.

The first part of this talk will present the development of the small jumping robot Salto-1P. Salto-1P achieved unparalleled jumping performance and demonstrated the first robotic wall jump, precise control to traverse obstacles much larger than the robot’s size, onboard estimation and control for autonomous and outdoor operation, and balanced launching and pinpoint landing.

The second part of the talk will describe ongoing work investigating the challenges of moving over and around plants: leaping among tree branches, and walking through undergrowth and vines.  The talk will close with plans for future work.

Justin Yim is a postdoctoral researcher with Aaron Johnson’s  Robomechanics Lab in the Mechanical Engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University supported by the Computing Research Association and Computing Community Consortium CIFellows 2020 postdoctoral fellowship. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and his B.S.E and M.S.E from the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests are in the design and control of legged robots to improve performance and understand locomotion principles. For his dissertation work developing the jumping monopod robot Salto-1P, he received best paper and best student awards at the IEEE/RSJ IROS and IEEE ICRA conferences.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/99462436924?pwd=bWdEdEh1OUtQaG9QUG40ZTgwZVViZz09

Meeting ID: 994 6243 6924
Passcode: 029211