SCAMP: The Flying, Perching, Climbing Robot

SCAMP - the Stanford Climbing and Aerial Maneuvering Platform - is designed to fly, perch, climb, recover from failure, and take off. It operates outdoors on rough vertical surfaces like concrete and stucco walls. The robot was developed at Stanford University's Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Lab. SCAMP is the first robot to combine flying, perching with passive attachment technology, and climbing. It can also recover from climbing failures, as well as take off when it's ready to fly again. It does all of this outdoors, using only onboard sensing and computation.

Transcript

00:00:01 this is scamp the Stanford climbing and aerial maneuvering platform a robot capable of flying perching climbing recovering from failure and taking off Outdoors using only onboard sensing and computation at Stanford we are interested in Quad rers because they can go places where people and terrestrial robots can

00:00:31 like over this rubble from an earthquake however most quad rors only have enough battery to sustain a few minutes of flight time if we look at this picture again we notice that there aren't a lot of good places to land there are however a lot of clean vertical services available for perching if we enable our robots to perch they can stay around longer perhaps measuring aftershocks or

00:00:52 setting up a temporary Communications Network once on the wall it's useful to be able to reposition the robot accurately for example by moving to the edge of the building to get better reception climbing is a more reliable way to accomplish this than taking off and rep perching especially when the weather turns windy to perch Scamp flies until its

00:01:10 tail contacts the wall unlike previous quadr perching strategies which usually take place in carefully controlled laboratory environments Scamp does not use a motion capture system or offboard computational resources so it must detect the impact by using its onboard accelerometers it responds by turning its rots on at maximum the tail acts as a pivot forcing the robot into the

00:01:32 correct orientation the rotors then adhere the robot to the wall aerodynamically until the vibrations from Impact are dissipated and its feet have found a good grip the rotors can then be turned off and Scamp can start to climb this mechanically assisted approach to perching is effective in a wide range of outdoor

00:01:57 [Music] situations Scamp climbs by alternating loads between its two feet the feet attached to bumps and Pits on the wall using tiny metal spikes referred to as microspines these attached when pulled down against the foothold and release when tension is removed a conventional climbing robot doesn't have to carry the extra weight

00:02:24 of a flying vehicle as it climbs however if such a robot misses a step and detaches from the wall the result are usually suboptimal on the other hand if Scamp misses a step and starts to fall it detects the drop in vertical acceleration and turns its rotors on briefly this returns it to the wall where it can re-engage with the surface and resume

00:02:43 climbing when Scamp is ready to take off it deploys a takeoff spine without this takeoff spine scamp's rotors would keep the robot stuck to the climbing surface unable to rotate without reversing thrust transferring load to the spine applies a mechanical moment that rotates Scamp away from the wall and allows it to fly away