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. The proposed research is anticipated to produce theories and methodologies for the design and operation of under-actuated robotics systems with resilient behavior. The program will also produce several prototypes of resilient robotic systems. The proposed research has a couple of intellectual merits. The notion of the resilient under-actuated robot has not been studied in the literature despite its benefits in terms of generality, capability, and cost-effectiveness. In fact, humans are under-actuated with many passive joints and structures. Resilient robotic systems which only have active modules with some structures are a special case of the under-actuated robot, so the knowledge generated for under-actuated robots is applicable to self-reconfigurable autonomous modular robots in literature. The resilient behavior of robots adds value to society. For instance, resilient robots in a battlefield situation can have a higher chance to win against the enemy, as the longevity of combat capability delivery in battlefields is certainly a critical factor. The resilient behavior of rescuer robots for disasters such as nuclear power plant accidents and earthquakes is highly desired, because in those situations, the environment in which the robots need to interact is dynamic, and there is higher chance for the robots to get damaged.