WeebleCopter Uses Rotors, Weights For Stable Hops
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Wednesday, 23 of September , 2009 at 3:43 am
When we posted about the Precision Urban Hopper last week, we commented that one of the biggest problems with hopping robots is keeping them stable. This WeebleCopter (I’m calling it that, it’s actually called a “hopping rotochute”) neatly solves this problem by using coaxial rotor blades to both jump up and decelerate back down to the ground. A weighted base and spherical roll cage keeps the robot stable in flight and makes sure that it always lands right-side up, Weeble-style. It’s important to note that this robot is not designed to be a helicopter… It’s not, as far as I can tell, capable of fully controllable flight (although it can hover), but instead uses a simple movable mass to control its pitch and direction of travel. This may seem like a disadvantage, but it saves on complexity and weight, and makes the bot more efficient: it can jump over obstacles or up to a perch when it needs to, but the rest of the time, it’s just sitting there and not expending energy.
There aren’t many details on the future of this robot, a project by Eric Beyer and Mark Costello from the Georgia Institute of Technology, but it (shockingly) looks to have been funded primarily by the army. Looks like hopping robots are going to be the next big battlefield toy, we’ll just have to see which design becomes the first to jump across the finish line into production.
VIA [ New Scientist ]
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Category: Research
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