Ascento: A Two-Wheeled Jumping Robot
This addresses the problem of indoor inspection tasks requiring agile navigation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing mobile robotics concepts.
The researchers tackled the challenge of creating a mobile ground robot with high speed and agility for complex indoor environments by introducing Ascento, a compact wheeled bipedal robot that moves quickly on flat terrain and overcomes obstacles by jumping, with experiments validating these behaviors in realistic scenarios.
Applications of mobile ground robots demand high speed and agility while navigating in complex indoor environments. These present an ongoing challenge in mobile robotics. A system with these specifications would be of great use for a wide range of indoor inspection tasks. This paper introduces Ascento, a compact wheeled bipedal robot that is able to move quickly on flat terrain, and to overcome obstacles by jumping. The mechanical design and overall architecture of the system is presented, as well as the development of various controllers for different scenarios. A series of experiments with the final prototype system validate these behaviors in realistic scenarios.