Biorobotics Laboratory BioRob

Centipede Robot Locomotion

The snake and salamander robot projects developed at Biologically Inspired Robotics Group (BIRG) have been successful projects involving a big amount of people and resources. These projects have helped to understand biological issues and have stimulated the developing of new tools and technologies.
The salamander robot project was born as an evolution of the snake robots Amphibot I and II and was used to demonstrate the underlying mechanisms of the spinal cord in vertebrates locomotion.
The centipede robot project becomes a logical evolution of the architecture of the robots mentioned before. Incrementing the number of legs and the number of modules should encourage numerous questions as How is locomotion affected when changing architecture parameters? or how is it possible to optimize locomotion with a given architecture? or for example how good is the response of a good locomotion gait on a different terrain?. This project tries to find an answer for these questions.

Movies

• CentipedeScript tool demo (.avi)
  
• Rigid body controller in a flat terrain scenario (.mpg)
• Oscillatory body controller in a flat terrain scenario (.mpg)
• Scolopendra heros centipede wandering (.avi)
  

Report

• Centipede robot locomotion. Final report of this project (.pdf).
• LaTeX project sources (.tgz)
• Final presentation (.pdf).
  

Source code

CentipedeScript is the application for fast building new centipede robot models compatibles with Webots. It has been coded in C++ and using Trolltech Qt 3.0 libraries and designed to be cross-platform as well.

• Screenshot (.jpg)
  
• CentipedeScript source code (.tgz)