Biorobotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University
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| Audience/Grade: | College Freshman-Graduate |
| Discipline(s): |
Computer Engineering Computer Science Electrical Engineering Engineering Mechanics Information Technology Mechanical Engineering Mechatronics |
| Special Topic(s): | |
| Learning Resource Type: |
Community - General |
| Media Type: |
Unknown |
| Author(s): |
Howie Choset |
| Description: | Research statement (excerpt) from lab director: "My education and research interests straddle the border between computational theory and mechatronic engineering, makes mathematical principles accessible to engineering, and reaches out to practioners in the chosen application fields. In my group’s research, rigorous mathematical results enable engineering advancements while the practical aspects of implementation drive theoretical pursuit. My program centers on two foci: highly articulated systems and coverage tasks. These foci touch upon fundamentals in robotics including: topological methods, control of mechanical systems, design, mapping, and differential geometry. This work is directly tied into search and rescue, de-mining, auto-body painting, and medical surgery. These endeavors require the interaction between people and technology and thus, I seek to exploit its benefits and understand the barriers of this interaction. My research group has constructed a variety of snake robots which can exploit their many internal degrees of freedom to thread through tightly packed volumes accessing locations that people and conventional machinery otherwise cannot. Three challenges facing snake robot research are design, path planning and locomotion. Since we are interested in search and rescue (I am an Associate Director for the Center for Robotic Assisted Search and Rescue), we designed our robots to maneuver in three- dimensions and posses a small cross-sectional diameter. Once the snake robot is built, it still requires control. Simple engineering hacks alone are not sufficient to coordinate the internal degrees of freedom to allow for purposeful motion. Essentially, the robot must plan in a non-Euclidean multi-dimensional space. Our approach uses a topological map of the space, which reduces planning from a multi-dimensional search problem to a one-dimensional search. In 1997, I received the NSF Career award to develop a topological map based on a retract-like structure for rod- shaped and convex-body robots operating in a non-Euclidean configuration space. In collaboration with the Johnson Space Center, we have applied this approach to AERCam, a free-flying robot." |
| Rating: |
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| Related Resources | |
| Keywords: | biomimetics biologically-inspired design robotics snake robots |
| Has Components: |
Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations Modular Snake Robots |
| Usage Tip | |
| Related ABET Criteria: |
(c) Design a system, component, or process |
| Use of Resource: |
Research lab with excellent examples of biologically-inspired robotics along with excellent educational resources. |
| Difficulty: |
Medium |
| Interactivity Level: |
Medium |
| Version Info | |
| Publication Date: | January 2010 |
| Platform/Format: |
WWW |
| Cost: |
Free |
| Download URL: | http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biorobotics/ |
| Metadata: |
IEEE LOM Record |
| Collection: |
NEEDS
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