ReachBot is a new project with Stanford's ASL and with NASA.
People:
| PI: Marco Pavone, Aero & Astro | AA PhD students: Stephanie Scheider |
| Co-I: Mark Cutkosky, ME | BDML Phd students: Tony Chen |
| Co-I: Mathieu Lapôtre, Geological Sciences |
Research Pillars:
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 terrains 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.
Currently the research is divided into the following four research pillars:
| 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.
Potential field testing location: Mojave Desert Lava Tube
News Articles and Presentations
CNN: meet a robot that could crawl through caves
NASA: ReachBot | A Revolutionary Rock-climbing Robot Concept