2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
Chinese company Tencent has unveiled Ollie, a two-wheeled robot with an optional robo-arm and pendulum to help it complete tasks. For example, it allows him to spin in flight and do somersaults, and also serves as a support when grabbing objects with his hand. The company posted a video demonstrating the robot on its Weibo account, and also told CnTechPost about it.
Robot developers are increasingly trying to combine the advantages of wheeled and walking modes of movement in them. Typically, the result is four-legged robots with optional wheels at the ends of their legs or knees, as in another recent development from Tencent. But there are also robots in which the wheels are used as the main tool for movement, although they are fixed on the legs. Several years ago, Boston Dynamics experimented with this design in one form or another (but eventually abandoned this idea, switching to a conventional wheeled platform), and Swiss engineers continue to experiment. Their robot, Ascento, is the closest in design to Ollie - it has a small size, two legs and wheels at their ends.
Ascento robot
Ollie also stands on two wheels, but instead of two legs it uses a pantograph design with four sections connecting the wheels to the body. The robot operates under dynamic control algorithms that maintain balance. Thanks to them, it will not roll over if one of the wheels suddenly falls down while driving or if a heavy object collides with it. It also allows him to descend stairs. One of the differences in the algorithms from previous analogs is that it can jump on obstacles with one or two wheels, even if they are comparable in height with its height (the minimum height of the robot is 35 centimeters).
The main structural difference is that Ollie has an additional movable part in the lower part of the body - a pendulum (or "tail", as it is often called in robotics). Engineers have come up with two uses for it.
First, since it has a noticeable mass relative to the robot, when rotating, it gives the robot an angular momentum and allows it to rotate in a jump. The developers showed how the robot drives up to the "cliff", jumps up and at the same time turns the pendulum, twisting itself. At the end of the upside-down jump, the pendulum returns to its original position and the robot lands without losing balance.
Secondly, the developers have shown that the pendulum can be used as a support. In this demonstration, they used a version of the pendulum that was about one and a half times elongated, due to which it reaches the floor, even if the robot almost completely straightened its legs. Also in this demo, Ollie was equipped with a robot arm and a depth camera for navigation. As a result, he was able to grab a glass of coffee from a barista and bring it to a client.
Using a robot to deliver coffee
In 2019, the American engineers who developed the bipedal Cassie robot demonstrated the quality of its balancing algorithms by placing it on gyro rollers that are controlled by the tilt of the body. Despite the fact that the gyro rollers have their own balancing algorithm, potentially conflicting with the robot's algorithm, Cassie was able to adapt to locomotion in such conditions without falling.
