Caltech and Technology Innovation Institute create first multirobot response system that includes a humanoid robot
Caltech and the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi have created a multirobot response team that integrates a humanoid robot.
The system is the result of a three-year collaboration between Caltech’s Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies and the Technology Innovation Institute. It includes a humanoid robot with a transforming drone that can launch off the humanoid’s back and drive away.
"Right now, robots can fly, robots can drive, and robots can walk. Those are all great in certain scenarios," says Aaron Ames, the Director and Booth-Kresa Leadership Chair of CAST and the Bren Professor of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, Control and Dynamical Systems, and Aerospace at Caltech. "But how do we take those different locomotion modalities and put them together into a single package, so we can excel from the benefits of all these while mitigating the downfalls that each of them have?"
The team recently conducted a demonstration of the system on Caltech’s campus, imagining there is an emergency on campus and sending the autonomous agents to the scene.
Using a modified Unitree T1 humanoid that could carry the M4 multimodal robot, which can fly and drive, as if it were a backpack.
The team hopes to make such autonomous systems safer and more reliable.
"We're thinking about safety-critical control, making sure we can trust our systems, making sure they're secure," Ames adds. "We have multiple projects that extend beyond this one that study all these different facets of autonomy, and these problems are really big. By having these different projects and facets of our collaboration, we are able to take on these much bigger problems and really move autonomy forward in a substantial and concerted way."
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