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Smart Canes Will Help Wobbly Humanoid Robots Rescue Our Stranded Asses

Researchers developed a new walking staff that can help rescue robots navigate uneven terrain after a natural disaster.
Image: Oussama Khatib, Stanford University; Shuyun Chung, Stanford University

Strong, tireless robots offer a ton of potential for disaster relief, but designing a bipedal robot that can walk across the rough terrain left by an earthquake is no easy task. I mean, arguably the most practical things we currently have going for us in terms of robot rescue are legions of hacked cockroach biobots.

Smart walking staffs that provide extra stability and environmental awareness to humanoid robots could make a non-human rescue attempt just a little less hair-raising.

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Four-legged robots like Boston Dynamics' Big Dog, which can hike up leaf-strewn hills, and MIT's Cheetah are able to navigate uneven ground with relative ease. But these robots lack the ability to easily use human-scale objects like stairs and ladders, actions that could be an asset when rescuing disaster survivors.

Humanoid robots can do these things, but they aren't yet stable enough to walk around on the kind of terrain easily crossed by quadrupeds like Cheetah and BigDog.

According to Shu-Yun Chung and Oussama Khatib, researchers at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab, the solution is to outfit bipedal robots with smart walking staffs that can be deployed at a moment's notice, giving them the extra support and situational awareness needed to cross a hairy patch of ground. No longer strictly bipedal or quadrupedal, the researchers call their new robotic system a SupraPed. It's the best of both worlds, really.

"When the robot requires extra sensing and mobility, it detaches one or both staffs from its body, attaching them to the wrist using a docking and locking mechanism." Chung and Khatib wrote in a paper they presented at the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. "At this point, the staff becomes like a hikers pole, able to support loads and substantially enhance the robots stability margin."

By distributing the robot's weight across multiple contact points, the staffs increase the size of the region inside which the robot can manoeuvre its center of mass without toppling over. In a simulation where the staffs' maximum support load was set at just 20 percent of the robot's weight, the SupraPed system doubled this region. Now, according to a National Science Foundation press release, prototype staffs have been manufactured and are ready to be tested on real robots.

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Image: Oussama Khatib, Stanford University; Shuyun Chung, Stanford University

Cameras on the tips of the staffs provide a 3D image of the surface environment to the robot, which it processes along with information from head-mounted cameras. Tactile sensors in the staffs measure the ground's physical features and provide additional information. With all this data, the staff-wielding robot can form more robust "beliefs"—or mental pictures—of its environment.

Although the robot is mostly autonomous, a human is in the SupraPed control loop. The human operator sees same 3D images as the robot, and actually feels the force exerted on the robot's arms through a haptic system that mimics the experience of feeling physical resistance with finely tuned motors. It's a feature that could come in handy when the robot needs to perform more precise actions.

According to the National Science Foundation, 10 years of research and over one million dollars in grants have gone into developing the SupraPed staffs. Chung and Khatib's prototype shows the concept's potential, but there's still plenty of work ahead.

It may be a while before humanoid robots are saving our asses after a disaster, but if the alternative is an electrode-packed roach scuttling up beside me, I can wait.