'Salto' Robot Jumps Over Three Times Its Height and Navigates Obstacle Courses
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley first introduced Salto, a little robot able to bounce over three feet high, in 2016. Now, they've updated the under-one-foot-tall robot with numerous new skills. Salto can bounce in place like a pogo stick, jump through obstacle courses, and take short jaunts through Berkeley's campus powered by a radio controller. The Berkeley researchers hope Salto will advance the development of small, nimble search-and-rescue mission robots.
Transcript
00:00:00 (upbeat music) - SALTO is a little 100 gram robot, and it's only about one foot long altogether, but we think it can do a bunch of really exciting tricks. I have been working on SALTO for almost four years. It's been so much fun the whole way through. With the first version of SALTO, we demonstrated that it can jump once off the ground and then again off the wall. Now with the newer version of SALTO,
00:00:39 it can run for up to 10 minutes at a time or even a little bit more and do hundreds of jumps in that period. Its maximum jump is about four feet high and can run eight or 10 miles an hour which is pretty fast for a little guy. It can clear obstacles by making really large jumps or by jumping far. It can even follow a moving target if we tell it where it is. The robot can also chain these maneuvers together
00:01:10 so that it can jump up onto things and clear obstacles very quickly. - It's worked probably better than any of our other robots we've had so far. These fast accelerations let us move on surfaces where a conventional robot would just fall right off. - Three, two, one. The motion capture room is one of our experimental test setups where we have almost a dozen cameras on the ceiling
00:01:42 all watching the robot. This is the motion capture software we use to track where SALTO is in the room. All these green lines point to where the cameras see it, and this is how we can figure out how fast it's moving and what angle it's at. This is SALTO's control board. This carries the little, tiny computer that's doing all of the processing and runs the algorithms that we've written for it.
00:02:03 My ground station laptop listens to the motion capture system to know where the robot is and then calculates what we want the robot to do and sends a radio signal to let SALTO know what angle we'd like it to reach and how to extend its leg. You'll see it tilt over forward so that it will bounce up onto the platform. Then in the air, it will redirect itself backwards so it will jump off of that platform onto the one behind it so that it can get to the spot it needs to very accurately.
00:02:30 (mellow music) Now that SALTO can go to a particular spot, it needs to know which way it's pointed, and so to do that, the robot has to use its onboard inertial measurement unit which kind of works like a human's inner ear. Essentially, give it a sense for which way is up when it's jumping so it doesn't fall over. When we take SALTO out of the motion capture room and out into the real world,
00:03:03 it has to do all of that on its own. Measuring where it is and which way is up and how fast it's going. Next, there's a lot of things that we'd like to get SALTO to work on. We'd like it to move on more complicated surfaces besides things like concrete or wood. Maybe they're things like grass or gravel. - [Ron] There's lots of things one can do by adding on pairs of legs or adding on arms.
00:03:36 So we would extend SALTO to add ability to, for example, grab onto branches to land and launch from those things. - There's lots of things that go into making the robot work, and all of them have to work together. The leg mechanism and the algorithms and the control and me as the person with the joysticks, and when I can get them all to work together and get the robot to go places, it's super exciting and really fun.
00:04:05 - [Man] Three, two, one. (cheering loudly) - [Man] Nice job man.