Just after I published my book Kinematic Synthesis of Mechanisms with its emphasis on leg mechanisms, I found two more interesting eight-bar legs from the designers at DIYWalkers.com
This is a Geogebra animation of the leg mechanism for the Strider walker. It is a symmetrical design that allows the formation of a second foot assembly by simply adding two more bars.
This is an animation of the leg mechanism in the TrotBot walker.
I am pleased to report that a paperback version my book Introduction to Theoretical Kinematics: the mathematics of movement is on-line with Amazon.com. I have updated it to reflect current terminology in Robotics and to correct all of the errors that I could identify. Please select the link Introduction to Theoretical Kinematics.
On May 8, 2018, I was pleased to give a seminar at the University of Pennsylvania GRASPLab: McCarthy Seminar.
They also videotaped my lecture. Here it is:
Springer Handbook of Robotics
I found this excerpt of the TEDx talk by Bruno Siciliano describing the growing research area of Roboethics to be fascinating and important. Prof. Siciliano is the Director of the ICAROS Center at the Universita degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. He is co-editor with Oussama Khatib of the first and second editions of the Springer Handbook of Robotics. The entire talk is available at the link Robotics and Napoli.
Symposia organized for the 2016 Mechanisms and Robotics Conference
The 2016 Mechanisms and Robotics conference is part of International Design Engineering Technical Conferences organized by ASME International in Charlotte, North Caroline, August 22-24.
Plenary speaker Bernard Roth is the Academic Director of Stanford University’s d.school and the author of the Achievement Habit.
For some reason, ASME has broken these links to the 2016 IDETC conference, but you can find out more about each of the symposia at the conference overview link: 2016 ASME Mechanism and Robotics Conference Overview. Then select the Expand all Symposia Link to see the sessions and a list of papers.
A research team including Profs. GimSong Soh, Kristin Wood and Kevin Otto at Robotics Innovation Lab at the Singapore University of Technology and Design has developed a rolling robot about the size of a baseball. The design and motion planning of this robot, Virgo 2.0, was presented at the Mechanisms and Robotics Conference which was part of the 2015 ASME Design Engineering Technical Conferences, August 2-5, in Boston, MA. A demonstration of the Virgo 2.0 moving through a figure eight path around obstacles is shown in the video below.
Students of Prof. Clement Gosselin at the Laval University Robotics Laboratory demonstrate a four-degree of freedom planar robot. I particularly like the demonstration of its use as a gripper that does a cartwheel just for fun.
Students in Professor Alice Agogino’s Berkeley Emergent Space Technologies Laboratory, the BEST Lab, working on motion planning for their tensegrity robot.
This is the participant patch for the 2015 Energy Invitational on May 24, 2015 on UCI’s Campus.
Energy Invitational
This is the participant patch for the 2015 Rescue Robotics Challenge on May 31, 2015
Rescue Robotics
An outcome of Mark Plecnik’s research on the kinematic synthesis of six-bar linkages is a variety of designs for the leg mechanisms of small walking machines.
We hope to build this walker over the summer. It has one drive motor on each side:
This is my favorite because it couples the legs on one side with a pantograph linkage. The leg joints are living hinges. and it seems this the entire leg system can be cut from a single sheet of plastic:
This is a design study for a walker with eight legs on one side, 16 total:
GraspLab Seminar