Recently, we finished designing and fabricating our second prototype
of the robot. To easily identify the two prototypes we have so far,
the first prototype is called flipping robot and
the second is called
crawling robot. These two prototypes mainly differ in their method of
locomotion.
DARPA Demonstration of Flipping Robot
The first prototype of our robot was demonstrated at the DARPA
Distributed Robotics Program held on September 12-15, 1999 at the
Quantico US Marine Base. During this meeting, our robot showed its
capability to walk on a real wall.
![[Fig: Climbing Robot]](phot105.jpg)
The following figures show a sequence of snapshots when our Wall Climber
demostrates its climbing capability.
If browser is capable of viewing RealVideo files, we have a snapshot
of video recording of our Wall Climber
walking on horizontal surface (245 Kbytes)
and climbing a vertical surface (308 Kbytes).
The first prototype of the robot has a leg of approximately 80 mm in length
and suction foot of approximately 40 mm in length. In the future, we will build
a similar robot with half of this size.
To see more detail view of each component, please click on the following
image to see a more detail description of each part!
Electrical Components
All the electrical and electromechanical components on the robots are controlled
via PIC Servo and
PIC I/O boards.
Three PIC Servo boards are used to control the three joints on the robot. The other
components (suction pump motors, micro valves, pressure sensors, limit switches)
are controlled via a single PIC I/O board.
Software Components
The software for controlling the robot is written in C++
and can be run
on two different platforms: Linux and 32-bit Microsoft Windows.
On both platforms,
GNU G++
has been used as the software development tools.
Crawling Robot
To enable our robot to move in more confined space, the second prototype
has been designed. The first prototype moves from foot to foot by flipping
its body, while the second prototype moves by expanding and shrinking its
body.
