Design and Control of Delta: Deformable Multilinked Multirotor with Rolling Locomotion Ability in Terrestrial Domain

In recent years, multiple types of locomotion methods for robots have been developed and enabled to adapt to multiple domains. In particular, aerial robots are useful for exploration in several situations, taking advantage of its three-dimensional mobility. Moreover, some aerial robots have achieved manipulation tasks in the air. However, energy consumption for flight is large and thus locomotion ability on the ground is also necessary for aerial robots to do tasks for long time. Therefore, in this work, we aim to develop deformable multirotor robot capable of rolling movement with its entire body and achieve motions on the ground and in the air. In this paper, we first describe the design methodology of a deformable multilinked air-ground hybrid multirotor. We also introduce its mechanical design and rotor configuration based on control stability. Then, thrust control method for locomotion in air and ground domains is described. Finally, we show the implemented prototype of the proposed robot and evaluate through experiments in air and terrestrial domains. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time to achieve the rolling locomotion by multilink structured mutltrotor.

Design and Control of a Humanoid Equipped with Flight Unit and Wheels for Multimodal Locomotion

Humanoids are versatile robotic platforms because of their limbs with multiple degrees of freedom. Although humanoids can walk like humans, the speed is relatively slow, and they cannot run over large barriers. To address these problems, we aim to achieve rapid terrestrial locomotion ability and simultaneously expand the domain of locomotion to the air by utilizing thrust for propulsion. In this paper, we first describe an optimized construction method of a humanoid robot equipped with wheels and a flight unit to achieve these abilities. Then, we describe the integrated control framework of the proposed flying humanoid for each mode of locomotion: aerial locomotion, leg locomotion, and wheel locomotion. Finally, we achieved multimodal locomotion and aerial manipulation experiments using the robot platform proposed in this work. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to achieve three different types of locomotion, including flight, by a single humanoid.