An Agile Monopedal Hopping Quadcopter with Synergistic Hybrid Locomotion
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- Опубликовано: 9 апр 2024
- Nature abounds with examples of superior mobility through the fusion of aerial and ground movement. Drawing inspiration from such multimodal locomotion, we introduce a high-performance hybrid hopping and flying robot. The proposed robot seamlessly integrates a nano quadcopter with a passive telescopic leg, overcoming limitations of previous jumping mechanisms that rely on stance phase leg actuation. Based on the identified dynamics, a thrust-based control method and detachable active aerodynamic surfaces are devised for the robot to perform continuous jumps with and without position feedback. This unique design and actuation strategy enable tuning of jump height and reduced stance phase duration, leading to agile hopping locomotion. The robot recorded an average vertical hopping speed of 2.38 meters per second at a jump height of 1.63 meters. By harnessing multimodal locomotion, the robot is capable of intermittent midflight jumps that result in substantial instantaneous accelerations and rapid changes in flight direction, offering enhanced agility and versatility in complex environments. The passive leg design holds potential for direct integration with conventional rotorcraft, unlocking seamless hybrid hopping and flying locomotion.
Songnan Bai, Qiqi Pan, Runze Ding, Huaiyuan Jia, Zhengbao Yang, and Pakpong Chirarattananon
Science Robotics, 2024
![The moment we stopped understanding AI [AlexNet]](/img/1.gif)
I'm dubbing this a Helihopter and no one is ever going to change my mind.
i don't think anyone is going to want to change your mind
Build a man sized one, real life approximation of the Scroll of Icarian Flight.
@@robertcollins4663 it would need a specially designed cockpit to protect the human from the forces of it bouncing which could be pretty high. It also likely wouldn’t be comfortable, lots of impacts and lots of time in free fall, it will probably make people nauseous and vomit, just like the “zero g” planes that fly special paths to achieve free fall. Going from free fall to a sudden impact would be pretty hard on the body, they might have to use the propellers to slow the fall and lessen the impact but this would limit the energy regained by the bounce, so you lose some of the benefits of hopping.
The only time this would be truly useful is in exploration or when transporting very non fragile goods.
@@conorstewart2214 I agree 100%. My comment was a joke about how it would kill the user.
Explanation of Joke: In Morrowind (a videogame about Scrolls from 2002) whilst walking about one will come across a Bosmer falling from the sky to his death. If you loot the body you find three "Scrolls of Icarian Flight" (Think Icarus, the greek legend) as well as the Bosmer's diary who's final entry is a very optimistic outlook at his latest invention of a Scroll that will let one "leap across continents". If you 'use' one of the Scrolls of Icarian Flight and then jump you will in fact "leap across the continent" likely to your death. This event occurs very close to the game's starting point and can be found-by and kill a new-and-unsuspecting player in under 5 minutes. I like it because the memory of thinking "wow I'm flying, WHAT I DIED????" at age ~11 will always stick with me but it also serves as an effective way to teach new players about fall-damage + the dangers of using what you don't know. A real "you're a long way from home, aren't you?" moment. Honestly what child is going to read "Scroll of Icarian Flight" and make the connection to the legend of Icarus? it's brilliant, I doubt many adults today ever got it.
We got a Monopedal Hopping Quadcopter with Synergistic Hybrid Locomotion before we got GTA 6.... wild.
Wait, y’all didn’t see that the game ISO was leaked????
Been playing for about 5 days brah
@@the.bog. Already level 9000
Because rockstar doesnt give a fuck. They know youll buy what ever garbage they put out.
I love Agile Monopedal Hopping Quadcopter with Synergistic Hybrid Locomotion
Wait, hold on. This is actually WILD!
Hopping cars are the future
My back
@@jackantlers no worries, there will be amortization rod mounted to sit on.
@@gniewomircioek6845Mr Garrison's monocycle?
@@TestUser-cf4wj I forgot it is a thing.
1:02 i'm being pedantic but it might be good to keep in mind that air friction exists, not just ground contact, as a component of energy loss in this design. still very impressive.
I agree. You're being pedantic.
Imagine a wave of these with explosives coming for you in a battlefield
Packs being controlled by motherships from above (MQ-9 reaper drones, etc)......want assistance clearing an urban battlefield quick....
And getting tangled in the grass...
A bouncing Betty pops up and explodes your groin. Fun, huh?
or a syringe
Yeah, imagine them bouncing across a muddy field or the loose sand of a beach. Just imagine it though, because you wouldn't be seeing it.
“Agile monopedal hopping hybrid locomotion…”
“Yes the way this copter moves is surely quite a notion….”
of all the ways av-ail-a-ble these scientists have chosen...
@@ASGerner supercalifragilistic
This is such a cool idea
Crazy efficiency. Ingenious idea!
1:35 IT CAN WALL JUMP!
Soon We will have parkour assassin's Creed robot
Have you ever tried standing?
Try using your head instead of “opening your mouth”
Y’all this was a joke. A funny one too.
Whoosh
@eblman5218 Warfare? It gets stuck in the mud and won't get out. There is not concrete on battleground.
@eblman5218 It happens everywhere. Mostly off the road.
@eblman5218 Off the road are mostly fields. In this season those will be wet and muddy. Because it often rains and the fields are plowed.
its adorable!
This is so cool! It's a surprisingly cute creature, too
Absolutely love it
So much character
It takes some impressive skill to both imagine & make something like this.
wow, cool robit!
Impressive, hat off for the Team
Now you just need a SWARM OF THESE CHASING YOU LOL
Nice work.
This is a really interesting idea. I would like to see it perform in differentent surfaces like sand, rock/gravel, dirt, etc
Very impressive
To add on the design, if not too weightconstraint, you could add a magnetic charging mechanism coupled with a converter and the battery to utilize the energy gained from gravity and the spring effect.
throw sand bag on wire over mines field, if it explode sand is more or less damps impact and automatic mini helicopter on gasalin is safe to go get next sand bag and check it again
That is the physical manifestation of the word "Thingumabob"
Scientists are terrible at naming things. I hear by name this "Hop-a-bot-a-mus"
second
third
Reminded me of the "jumping" tank concept
I want to see freestyle more 😅. Made me smile
Very very cool. Could make some dough by selling on the toy market, but other than that not really sure why you'd want a robot that hops. I mean the benefits of Drones are that it can carry things fast, over any terrain, and far above potential hazards, the benfits of wheels are that they are power efficient and stable. When would a hopping drone be desired?
Well say you need to get a secret message from your empire to a small community on the outskirts. You could easily do it with this guy since 1 charge lasts an hour.
In all serious, bare in mind this is only a prototype for demonstration. This method could be used on a larger scale. They are much more energy efficient than only-flight drones, and this would apply to scale. One of these with a bigger battery and 6-10x scale could prolly deliver your food order.
This was very documented.
Seems like it could be used for checking levelness of surfaces for largescale 3D printing in remote areas 👍
"In other words, It's a drone with a pogo stick."
wow, that's pretty adorable. reminds me of Chester, from Loony Tunes - the optimistic tiny dog that hopped all around the big dog, Spike. reorienting the drone mid-air so that leg can propel it anywhere - kinda exciting in that, to me at least, it feels more natural than a hovering drone - there's less dissonance when I see something bouncing vs floating. More approachable and friendly. I wonder if some systems would only get more efficient at larger scale - with added weight, could regenerative braking conserve some power and still allow for bounce?
Great! These will be very hard to aim at when fitted with minitature guns. Perfect!
By the time they're big enough to carry guns, they'll be the size of washing machines and _very_ easy to target.
@@TestUser-cf4wj what are you on about, a gun can be made small enough to fit on anything. Also they could already carry small explosives.
Thats fuckin dope
That's super cool, but I hope you'll also try with a single motor and maybe a counterweight/solar panel/sail. That way it might be more deployable (packing thousands of them together) and maybe more energy efficient as well.
This is a great! Could you also add to the efficiency by capturing the energy of the bounce to charge the battery?
The weight might offset the gains on this design but on a larger design that would be a great idea
is good ida😮
Pogo stick + quadcopter = this in bigger form
@eblman5218 I'll leave that to a much younger person with good balance
I'm really curious if you can get it to hop on a horizontal surface above it like a ceiling. It probably wouldn't have much practical use but it would look so cool if you could make it ricochet around all surfaces of a room
Cannot think of any practical application, but I need one.
Amazing. Where can we buy this?
I'd call it "Bouncing Betty".
Now this will be available on Temu in two months
lol
Id like to see the quadcopter flight time without the hopping and passive stabilizing system for a more accurate comparison. Id also like to see its performance in medium and heavy winds. Interesting video and thank you.
It's stated in the video that the flight time without hopping is ~6 minutes.
Beware the ultimate weakness, a floor grate.
Maybe if they use sonar but you would see it basically transparently thatway you would have two signals at different distances right? Then you can just fly. Or just aim REALLY well.
This is a crazy toy for kids also.
Neat idea! I wonder how much mass should be added for this jumping and stabilizing feature, but if you said that it last 50 min, that is beyond the flight time that drones of that size endure. But not sure what would be the max flight time of a specialize drone of that mass without that feature, next time use that to compare.
But yeah, the idea seem solid, I understand why this should be more energy efficient in term of flight time and change of direction.
But it has one drawback, this work fine against hard surfaces, on dirt ground you would be losing a lot of energy on each jump.
2:36 _"unstructured outdoor environments"_
proceeds to show concrete, cement and tiled floor with rising stairs
Unstructured environment, in robotics, means any environment which has had no modification to assist the robot's functionality.
@@Gigasimo456 ohw, ohkayh. thanks.
kinda like "out in wild" phrase in common speak, right :D
> _"Unstructured environment, in robotics, means any environment which has had no modification to assist the robot's functionality."_
@@yash1152 Yes, that's it!
Would probably struggle to get similar efficiency in anything soft like grass, would absorb the impact energy from the foot instead of rebounding. Unless they scale it up a bit, a big like 5ft one of these would be bananas
Small drone with a pogo stick on the bottom. Genius.
what happens when it hops on soft material and falls over, does it start by itself?
The future of the bouncing Betty, folks.
Over what altitude is this effective?
I thought it was going to somehow hop in the air like a blooper.
what would be the application of this?
Probably going to take some thinking. One potential application would be autonomous drones that monitor crops or pipelines or anything close to the ground, it could use the bouncing to increase flight time. It could still even take pictures as it will be motionless for a brief period at the top of a bounce.
One application could be for surveying expansive terrains efficiently. Imagine deploying a swarm of robots that combine hopping for extended operation times with flying. This ensures broad area coverage across diverse landscapes within a 50+ minute span by this demonstration alone.
@@rougechampion I suspect it would be useless on soil and soft ground, and anywhere where there's obstruction like foliage. I imagine it might be useful in _some_ urban search and rescue applications, surveillance/patrol/security applications, and potentially some military applications. Ultimately though, I guess the biggest use is as a proof of concept for research. This specific configuration doesn't need to have direct application for it to provide useful data/development/understanding.
@@himselfe yeah very good point. Using it to rapidly decelerate was neat too. Like you said this is so novel it is a step towards potentially more useful designs and applications
NASA will 100% adopt something like this for their next drones sent to Mars/etc.
but if mine is not presure detection ? movement detection ? also works. What else ?
I classify this as "repetitive crash-tolerant drone".
Quadhopter
hop on, little dude
I can't think of any good use case for this. The increase in time will be used up by decrease in speed, so the range won't change much, furthermore it requires predictable terrain else the leg might get stuck in deep mud or even drown in water. Could you list some valid usages pls?
It looks like good toy. I can not imagine some better application than "toy". I gues it will not work on soft clay ground.
Okay, you have locomotion down. Now, what kind of work can it do?
Reminds me of Turnip Head
I couldnt think of his name but this is exactly what I thought lol
okay but... what would you do with them? that seems so incredibly niche that its not really useful?
The direction change hopping seems like it wouldn’t be very useful. Drones can already accelerate and decelerate rapidly, just look at racing drones for an extreme example. It would also likely be better just to coast for a bit before you need to change direction, using the air resistance to slow it down.
It’s neat, but it what real-world use cases does it have where a much more power efficient, simple, and reliable, ground based walking / driving robot wouldn’t be superior?
I want to ride the pogo copter
Now someone make an fpv version please
Oh i thought it said syring like it was a homing drone that stabs people
BOING
0:36 animal crossing sounds
Parkour robot is here now i guess
is there electronic energy recovery (regen)
There isn't, it's just a sim rubber band. Energy recovery wouldn't make much sense here, because you're trying to convert as much of the downward momentum back to upwards momentum. The only part that is lost is because of friction. A regenerative system wouldn't really decrease friction, but it would convert part of the upward momentum to electricity. Turning this electricity back to upward momentum would be probably much less efficient than the rubber band.
*simple rubber band
I don't see any usage cases.
try hopping on sand
Now imagine these as bombs.....
it hop, eheheh
yippie yippie yippie yippie yippie yippie
The stabilisers are not a good idea, they will act like giants sails on the top and will limit the speeds and acceleration it could achieve when flying, it would also throw off the aerodynamics and the controller. Achieving stability should be possible just using the IMU and some processing and possibly GPS or similar or even optical flow, just like existing drones do, with optical flow and the IMU being the best options. The stabilisers will also make it perform very poorly in wind, it will just get blown about with even light wind and it will make it less efficient even if there is no wind and the efficiency will drop off rapidly when there is wind and with its airspeed.
If you can fly, and you're weight-constrained by the usual quad copter dynamics... why do you need to hop? What's it getting you?
SALTO in 2014 at least made some sense.
Damn so now bouncing Bettie’s can follow me??
Why not incorporate a charging system, every hop moves a magnet through a coil 🤷♂️ trickle charging onboard battery
That will not increase battery life because if the kinetic energy is turned into electricity less of the kinetic energy will be used to stretch the rubber band so it will not bounce as high need more power from the drone to get it back to the original height. That would be like putting an electric generator on the back of an electric car to infinity charge the battery, it does not work.
I don't see this catching on...
the doodad
Needs to go to mars..
and do what? also it will sink in sand
@@AnotherComment-rl6fv yes! That would be cool!
As soon as I saw the name I was CERTAIN it was going to have a funny acronym but nope…. It doesn’t its just a REALLY weird name
Well, I don't know that this is a university level thing. Seems like something you bang out with a 3d printer and an RPi in an afternoon but cool, I guess.
It's easy to build but hard to program.
@@PixlRainbow not really. I'm not sure why they even used motion capture for this. Its unnecessary. What part do you think is "hard"?
@@htomerifthe motion capture is just there as an indoors GPS substitute, so they can specify waypoints. It is part of their automated testing setup.
The part that is hard is that it uses a Model Based Controller (MBC) instead of PID, which requires the motion of the quadcopter in all possible states to be mapped out ahead of time in the form of an equation. PID is simple and works for cases involving a single input (accelerometer) tied to a single output (thrust), but has the disadvantage that it becomes difficult to tune when there are multiple modes of locomotion mixed together.
@@PixlRainbow mocap is not an "indoor GPS substitute". GPS is a relatively small part of an IMU, and IMUs can use dead reckoning to follow a list of relative coordinates. (my background is mostly in things that make a one trip towards tank sized objects).
There are a whole, whole lot of open source IMU packages and another pile of open source optical motion tracking packages. I've never used either of those because its actually extremely easy to program.
For me personally, I wrote an accelerometer/gyro IMU in assembly (and some c) for an ATxmega256 (I forget exactly which one) and I wrote the optical tracking software (i.e. the machine basically tracking the floor) in c using the FFTW library on a (now defunct) TI OMAP processor, though it should work on any ARM processor with NEON extensions.
As for "model based controlling" what else is there? Even the weird old quadruped I made of plywood used a physics model of itself. It isn't hard. Just some trig and basic understanding of physics and programming.
If this was some ECE 200 level course, then fine. But this is a published paper and as such it is an embarrassment.
You know, I'll give you this: maybe this just isn't that easy for most people.
Great job you figured that out all on your own 👏. Adding a oscillating system to improve performance well done👍. All good and fine until I come by from out the corner and hit that thing with a baseball bat in mid air😂that thing will be multiple home run at ones 🤣
This is actually a brilliant idea, and you comment makes you look like an idiot
Just, like, sit. On the ground. Fly when you need. All this talk of efficiency is only in the context of constant unnecessary motion. And this doesn't appear to be able to sit. At all. If you need to move, fly. If you don't need to move, don't. I feel insane. Why does this exist? Besides being adorable, obviously.
uehehe, now invent a hopping flying car ...
average graduate level research project
My cats would destroy this in a day.
I mean it's cool and all but can you put a gun on it?
Ukraine gonna weaponize this agaisnt Russian armoured tanks
... Here is an idea: use wheels, stop jumping and moving all over the place.
The ground will 100 counteract gravity.
For better efficiency, use thin iron wheels, with little to no friction. Bonus point if you add rails.
It will be the highest efficiency drone ever, with an easy moving scheme, allowing for minimal programming to 100% reliable and effective operating.
trains be trains. Trains out-train you.
Ugh, that voice.... too AI... sorry.