HAMR-Jr Is a Speedy Quadrupedal Robot the Size of a US Penny
takyon writes:
HAMR-Jr Is a Speedy Quadrupedal Robot the Size of a Penny:
The last time we checked in with the Harvard Ambulatory MicroRobot (HAMR) was in 2018, when I spent far too much time trying (with a very small amount of what might charitably be called success) to adapt some MC Hammer lyrics for an article intro. Despite having micro robot" right in the name, if we're talking about insect scale, HAMR was a bit chunky, measuring about 5 centimeters long and weighing around 3 grams. At ICRA this week, we've been introduced to a new version of HAMR, called HAMR-Jr, which is significantly smaller: just a tenth of the weight, and comes up to about knee-high on a cockroach.
HAMR-Jr may be tiny, but it's no slouch-piezoelectric actuators can drive it at nearly 14 body lengths (30 cm [~12 inches]) per second, at a gait frequency of 200 hertz. The actuators can be cranked up even more, approaching 300 Hz, but the robot actually slows down past 200 Hz, because it turns out that 200 Hz hits a sort of resonant sweet spot that gives the robot as much leg lift and stride length as possible.
It's worth mentioning that even the fastest legged insects don't reach a gait frequency of 200 Hz. While the Australian tiger beetle seems to be the world's fastest legged insect, able to reach about 2.5 m/s (!) when chasing prey with a gait frequency of just a few tens of hertz, what's more relevant here is probably the fastest insect relative to its size (so, fastest speed measured in body lengths per second). That award goes to a tiny species of mite found in California, able to run at nearly 200 body lengths per second. This works out to something like 0.25 m/s because the mites are seriously tiny (sesame-seed sized), but juveniles managed to hit a stride frequency of 135 Hz, which is the same ballpark as HAMR-Jr, albeit on a much smaller scale.
Scaling down an insect-size microrobot, HAMR-VI into HAMR-Jr," by Kaushik Jayaram, Jennifer Shum, Samantha Castellanos, E. Farrell Helbling, and Robert J. Wood from Harvard and UC Boulder, is being presented at ICRA 2020.
ICRA 2020: "2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation - ICRA 2020, Paris, Virtual Conference, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society."
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