Design and navigation of wheeled, running, swimming and flying robots

Summary form only given. Robots are rapidly evolving from factory workhorses, which are physically bound to their workcells, to increasingly complex machines capable of performing challenging tasks as search and rescuing, surveillance and inspections, planetary exploration or autonomous transportation of goods. This requires robots to operate in unstructured and unpredictable environments and various terrains. My talk will focus on design and navigation aspects of wheeled, legged, swimming and aerial robots operating in complex environments. Our wheeled inspection robots are designed for crawling into machine and take various measurement. For our quadruped walker we are researching optimal ways for exploiting the natural dynamics and serial elastic actuation. Our swimming robots take inspiration from natural counterpart for optimal propulsion and with our micro-helicopters projects we approach autonomous flight and inspections in cluttered and very narrow indoor environments as well as GPS denied visual navigation in cities. And with the solar airplanes we develop a small fixed-wing airplane capable of staying in the air indefinitely due to its solar powered generator.