The adelopod tumbling robot

Abstract

The desire for a high mobility-to-size ratio in mobile robots has led to the exploration of many new methods of locomotion, one of which is tumbling. We believe that tumbling has a great potential to produce high mobility-to-size ratios in miniature mobile robots. In this paper we discuss tumbling locomotion and introduce the Adelopod, a small two-armed tumbling robot recently developed at the University of Minnesota Center for Distributed Robotics. The Adelopod achieves high mobility with low hardware complexity, making it a desirable addition to any heterogeneous team of robots.