MABEL - the world's fastest knee-equipped bipedal robot

http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~grizzle/papers/MABEL.html in the Summer 2008, they completed assembly of a novel planar bipedal robot for use at the University of Michigan. The robot, named MABEL, was designed in collaboration with Jonathan Hurst, Al Rizzi and Jessica Hodgins of the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon. Jonathan Hurst was responsible for the design of the mechanical systems of the robot. MABEL is comprised of five links assembled to form a torso and two legs with knees. The legs are terminated in point feet. The planar nature of the robot is manifested in the hips, which are constrained to revolute motion in the sagittal plane. The robot is attached to a boom and hence walks or runs in a circle; when the radius is sufficiently large, this corresponds to locomotion along a straight line. Up to this point, the robot is similar to RABBIT, the French robot on which we collaborated from 2001 through 2004.

The novel aspects of MABEL, and there are many, appear in the transmission or powertrain . First of all, all of the actuators (four DC-brushless motors, two for each leg) are located in the torso, so that the legs are as light as possible; this is done for running efficiency. In RABBIT and most other robots, the knee actuators are mounted on the thigh. Secondly, the actuated degrees of freedom of each leg do not correspond to the knee and the hip angles (the hip angle being the relative angle between the torso and thigh). Instead, for each leg, a collection of differentials is used to connect two motors (once again, located in the torso) to the hip and knee joints in such a way that one motor controls the angle of the virtual leg consisting of the line connecting the hip to the toe, and the second motor is connected--in series with a spring--in order to control the length (or shape) of the virtual leg.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• world
• record
• new world
• champion
• real

[AALEVK]

Lol I'm human and can run almost completely silent! Needs a little noise reduction!

[oooJimEooo]

One step closer to terminators running around...

[exsosist123]

cool, thought it got faster than 6.8 though it was fair moving

[volleyball1527]

why itso loud?

[pizzaphilip]

i realy dont want to have that thing running after me...

[depro9]

Japan is light years ahead of the U.S. with robotics!

[MurdocLC]

@MaCs1313 Doesn't look creepy at all. Looks very interesting. But I'm sure it couldn't do that without the attachment...

[MaCs1313]

looks creepy, something's wrong