A marsupial robotic system: combines a legged and an aerial robot

WHAT IS A MARSUPIAL ROBOT?

It is a giant robot (mother robot) that carries more miniature robots on its back. It is a powerful scouting tool and is used for scouting environments.

DESIGNING OF MOTHER ROBOT OF MARSUPIAL ROBOT

A mother or transporting robot is dedicated to retrieving, transporting, and deploying the smaller robots to put together a robotic team called the marsupial robotic system.

To manage children’s robots flexibly, a docking station is mounted on the mother robot with a lifting platform dragged via lead-screw driving. Also, touch switches are used to initialize the lifting height and identify whether a child robot arrives at the landing position.

A dock camera is set on the top of the station to recognize children’s robots to deploy or retrieve them.

The movement ability of the bot is enhanced by combining the advantages of the wheeled-mobile platform and tracked-mobile platform with the concept of the wheel-track combo, which barely increases the complexity of the mechanism.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The collaboration between a walking robot like ANYmal, which has an incredibly long operation time, high payload capability, communication to a ground station extension capability but limited to ground operations, and a flying robot-like RMF-Owl, results in an overall very efficient exploration mission.

When ANYmal decides that there is no more space, he can explore by an operator command. If communication allows, it will place itself at the border of these identified regions, send the up-to-date map to RMF-Owl, and command the flying robot to explore the new section, updating and expanding the shared map.

The ANYmal has a recharging system on its back, and when RMF-Owl lands on the platform, it can recharge.

By tethering a UAV to a tracked vehicle, you can navigate dangerous environments more safely. Fotokite is one such marsupial robot made for this sort of thing by autonomously sticking to one place. Its patented algorithms can make the drone estimate its position and localize itself based on the tension from a tether, not based on things like GPS or optical sensors.

The mother robot provides stability and power to the UAV. Tapping into its mother’s battery lets the UAV stay airborne far longer than your typical quadcopter. The tracked vehicle can handle the heavy lift of processing. For instance, it might carry a bulky lidar unit to map the environment with lasers.

APPLICATION

The marsupial robot is designed for military tasks and tasks, which include environmental monitoring, wildlife tracking, and search & rescue missions. It helps to monitor surroundings and map areas that are inaccessible and dangerous for humans to explore. It can be used to explore indoor regions of dangerous areas like nuclear power plants safely.

CONCLUSION

The marsupial robot can be utilized for various exploration tasks and has many use cases. With more development in technology, it can be used for long hours and will be able to produce good results with better accuracy and navigation and also cover much more area.

It can also be utilized for security by keeping a guard in an area and alerting officials if there are any intruders.

Yalmarthy NV Ronnit gupta is the writer of this article. Views expressed, and information provided belong solely to the author.