Research into resilient under-actuated robots

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Resilience of engineering systems has gained much attention since 2006. Resilience characterizes a system in terms of its ability to recover from any mishap through its own resources and power. The motivation of the proposed research comes from our understanding of the importance of resilient systems, especially resilient robotic systems. The long-term goal of this research program is to establish resilience engineering in systems, especially robotic systems. To ensure the research results will be most widely applicable, the proposed research will be based on under-actuated robots, which are the most general and the most complex type of robots. There are four short-term goals of the proposed research (in brief): (1) designing resilient under-actuated robots for enabling as many recovery principles as possible; (2) finding the best configuration of a robot to recover lost function due to partial damage of the robot (e.g. one leg lost); (3) designing a connector for enabling active, passive, and fixed joints and disjoints to facilitate self-changes of the partially damaged robot; (4) planning and scheduling the self-change process to achieve the best configuration of the robot.