The ALLOMAN Hexapod Can Switch Into Five- or Four-Legged Mode on the Fly by Morphing Legs to Arms
Inspired by the animal kingdom, this six-legged robot can grab objects on the run with its convertible forelimbs.
A trio of researchers from the Robotics Institute of Beihang University have put together a novel six-legged robot dubbed ALLOMAN — and say that the design, which offers two combined arm-legs at the front, provides improved manipulation capabilities over its rivals.
The Arm-Leg Locomotion and Manipulation (ALLOMAN) robot, the team explains, is designed to address the need to add improved manipulation capabilities to legged robots — but without the usual approach of simply tacking on an extra arm, which the researchers claim is a high-cost and low-efficiency approach offering low flexibility.
Their alternative: Using a novel limb design, dubbed simply enough the leg-arm. In locomotion mode, the ALLOMAN robot acts like a six-legged hexapod — running on all six of its limbs. When it needs to manipulate something, one of its two forelimbs converts into an arm and the robot switches to five-legged pentapod mode. If a single arm isn't enough for a task, the second forelimb can convert too — finishing with the robot standing on four legs and using two arms. Better still, it can do all of these things even while moving.
"Manipulating while moving is an effective way for an animal to increase efficiency and gain time," says Kun Xu, associate professor and corresponding author of the paper. "For the novel hexapod robot presented in this study, due to the leg–arm integration mechanism and the high fault tolerance of the limbs, the robot can evidently achieve [the same] mobile manipulation function."
"[The] ALLOMAN hexapod robot is an experimental prototype at present and it's still far from perfect," admits Xilun Ding, professor and co-author. "Next, we will focus on the improvement of prototype development and the implementation of more manipulation functions.
"This work is being advanced step by step and will be applied in many fields which is in urgent need of multi-functional platform such as city security, anti-terrorism manipulation, and planetary exploration in the near future."
The team's work has been published under open-access terms in the journal Frontiers of Mechanical Engineering.