CAREER: Morphological Computation for Resilient Dynamic Locomotion of Compliant Legged Robots with Application to Precision Agriculture

这个学院早期职业发展（Career）项目为精准农业创新了兼容的多腿机器人技术。高敏捷性、机动性和有效载荷能力，加上占地面积小，使腿式机器人非常适合精准农业应用。该项目开发并实验验证了一个理论和计算框架，用于结构兼容的有腿机器人在自然地形上导航。一系列系统的实验将展示如何增加机器人结构的顺应度——从臀部和腰部关节的被动弹性，到完全可变形的底盘和腿——影响运动的效率和弹性。该项目将设计、建模、运动控制和规划方面的基础机器人研究整合到K-12和高等教育的两个教育和推广项目中。第一个是面向加州大学河滨分校（University of California-Riverside）本科生的机器人创客空间，第二个是面向女中学生的机器人夏令营。这两项努力都利用了加州大学河滨分校（UC Riverside）的学生多样性，这是一所西班牙裔服务机构，旨在扩大代表性不足的少数群体的参与。该项目研究了如何利用嵌入有腿机器人的合规性来促进控制和计算，着眼于在实际农业领域实现高效和有弹性的导航。研究活动沿着三个关键的基础机器人研究方向创新。1)硬件设计和动态建模：该项目提供了关于各种形式的顺应性对某些类别的有腿机器人的质心运动和步态稳定的影响的基本见解和开发模型，并引入了可以利用顺应性和实现形态计算原理的新硬件设计。2)运动控制：本项目根据全身控制和基于中心模式生成器的控制原理，建立具有顺应性感知的腿式运动控制器，实现在一系列工程和自然非结构化地形上的高效闭环腿式运动。3)非完整运动规划和自主导航：该项目开发非完整运动规划器，依靠和利用机器人身体形态的独特特征和嵌入式顺应性，在真实的农业领域自主腿部运动时提高效率和弹性。这项研究可以改变自主腿式机器人的科学技术，使其在操作中更加高效和有弹性，从而释放腿式机器人在精准农业中的全部潜力。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project innovates compliant multi-legged robotics technology for precision agriculture. High agility, maneuverability, and payload capacity, combined with a small footprint, make legged robots well suited to precision agriculture applications. This project develops and experimentally validates a theoretical and computational framework for structurally compliant legged robots to navigate over natural terrain. A systematic series of experiments will show how increasing the degree of compliance in the robot structure -- from passive elasticity in hip and waist joints, to fully deformable chassis and legs -- affects the efficiency and resilience of locomotion. The project integrates foundational robotics research on design, modeling, motion control, and planning into two educational and outreach programs across K-12 and higher education. The first is a robotics makerspace for undergraduate students at the University of California-Riverside, and the second is a robotics summer academy camp for female middle-school students. Both efforts capitalize on student diversity at UC Riverside, a Hispanic Serving Institution, to broaden participation of under-represented minority groups.The project investigates how compliance embedded into a legged robot can be harnessed to facilitate control and computation, with an eye to enabling efficient and resilient navigation in real agricultural fields. Research activities innovate along three key foundational robotics research directions. 1) Hardware design and dynamic modeling: The project offers fundamental insights and develops models regarding the effect of various forms of compliance on center of mass motion and gait stabilization for certain classes of legged robots and introduces new hardware designs that can harness compliance and enable principles of morphological computation. 2) Locomotion control: The project establishes compliance-aware legged locomotion controllers according to principles of whole-body and central pattern generator-based control to enable efficient closed-loop legged locomotion over a range of engineered and natural unstructured terrains. 3) Non-holonomic motion planning and autonomous navigation: The project develops non-holonomic motion planners that rely upon and utilize distinctive features of robot body morphology and embedded compliance for efficiency and resilience during autonomous legged locomotion over real agricultural fields. This research can transform the science and technology of autonomous legged robots by making them more efficient and resilient in their operation, and thus unlock legged robots’ full potential in precision agriculture.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.