A Flexible Exoskeleton for Collision Resilience
This provides a protective solution for robots in high-risk environments like cluttered spaces or reinforcement learning training, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing exoskeleton concepts.
The researchers tackled the problem of robot damage from collisions by designing a flexible exoskeleton inspired by arthropods, resulting in a sub-250g quadcopter that survives multiple impacts with a five-fold increase in passive energy absorption.
With inspiration from arthropods' exoskeletons, we designed a simple, easily manufactured, semi-rigid structure with flexible joints that can passively damp impact energy. This exoskeleton fuses the protective shell to the main robot structure, thereby minimizing its loss in payload capacity. Our design is simple to build and customize using cheap components and consumer-grade 3D printers. Our results show we can build a sub-250g, autonomous quadcopter with visual navigation that can survive multiple collisions, shows a five-fold increase in the passive energy absorption, that is also suitable for automated battery swapping, and with enough computing power to run deep neural network models. This structure makes for an ideal platform for high-risk activities (such as flying in a cluttered environment or reinforcement learning training) without damage to the hardware or the environment.