ReachBot animation by Stephanie Newdick and Julia Di
ReachBot is a Phase II NIAC project with Stanford's ASL and with NASA.
The objective of this effort is to develop a mission architecture where a long-reach crawling and anchoring robot, which repurposes extendable booms for mobile manipulation, is deployed to explore and sample difficult terrain on Solar System bodies, with a key focus on Mars exploration. To this end, the robot concept we present here, called ReachBot, uses rollable extendable booms as manipulator arms and as highly reconfigurable structural members. ReachBot is capable of (1) rapid and versatile crawling through sequences of long-distance grasps, (2) traversing a large workspace while anchored (by adjusting boom lengths and orientations), and (3) applying high interaction forces and torques, primarily leveraging boom tensile strength and the variety of anchors within reach.
People:
| PI: Marco Pavone, Aero & Astro | AA PhD students: Dan Morton and alumna Stephanie Newdick |
| Co-I: Mark Cutkosky, ME | BDML PhD students: Tony Chen, Julia Di, StanleyWang |
| Co-I: Mathieu Lapôtre, Geological Sciences |
Research Pillars:
Minimalist configuration RBLite is a very light and compact variation on the ReachBot concept with just one or two deployable boom-arms that are used to position grippers attached to cables.
RP I: Optimize Reachable Workspace Optimization of ReachBot’s reachable workspace of stable configurations.
S. Newdick, T.G. Chen, Ben Hockman, E. Schmerling, M.R. Cutkosky and M. Pavone, “Designing ReachBot: System Design Process with a Case Study of a Martian Lava Tube Mission” (arxiv) submitted to ICRA 2023.
S. Schneider, A. Bylard, T. G. Chen, P. Wang, M. R. Cutkosky, and M. Pavone, “ReachBot: A Small Robot for Large Mobile Manipulation Tasks,” (arxiv) in IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, Montana, 2022.
| RP II: RPII: Grasping Site Selection and Gripper Design |
Identifying grasping sites and designing lightweight and robust grippers.
T. G. Chen, B. Miller, S. Schneider-Newdick, A. Bylard, M. Pavone, and M. R. Cutkosky, “ReachBot: A Small Robot with Exceptional Reach for Rough Terrain,” in Proc. IEEE Conf. on Robotics and Automation, 2022.
| RP III: Develop Control Strategies to Mitigate Risk |
Design control strategies to maximize robustness and mitigate impacts from grasp failures.
S. Newdick, N. Ongole, T.G. Chen, E. Schmerling, M.R. Cutkosky and M. Pavone, “Motion Planning for a Climbing Robot with Stochastic Grasps,” (arxiv) in IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, Montana, 2023.
| RP IV: Test in Realistic Mission Environment |
Field testing of partial ReachBot in a realistic environment.
T. G. Chen, S. Newdick, J. Di, C. Bosio, N. Ongole, M. Lapôtre, M. Pavone, M. R. Cutkosky, Locomotion as manipulation with ReachBot. Sci. Robot. 9, eadi9762 (2024). DOI:10.1126/scirobotics.adi9762 (pre-print also available on arxiv)
News Articles and Presentations
- Scientific America: Spiderlike Mars Robot Might One Day Crawl through Unexplored Volcanic Caves
- CNN: meet a robot that could crawl through caves
- NASA: ReachBot | A Revolutionary Rock-climbing Robot Concept
(ReachBot papers are on the MobileManipulationPubs page.)