Invited Talks Robotics as an Engine of Global Disruptive Change?

The main goal of the proposed research is to develop a team of micro-machines for in-situ repair and maintenance within constrained and hazardous environments. The use of micro-machines removes human workers from having to crawl within highly cluttered and constrained spaces, breathing in stale air mixed with fumes from welding or particulates from repair work, and provides higher reliability and consistency in the repair work. The micro-machines will need to traverse over highly irregular terrain while maintaining the multiple degrees-of-freedom necessary for the repair work. Therefore, one outstanding solution could be using hexapod walking robots capable of both walking and manipulating. Since micro-machines should be capable of actively maintaining stability within the tool workspace while in motion, both workspace and stability become most important parameters to be considered for design and control purposes. To enhance the workspace and stability, a scalable hexapod robot is designed by adding prismatic joints into the hexapod articulated legs which provide the robot a flexible workspace. The closed-loop solution to the reachable workspace of the robot is presented. For stability purposes, a Foot Force Stability Margin is presented and shown to be accurate, simple, sensitive, and efficient enough making it practical for use in on-line and real-time controllers. Finally, proper control strategies are needed to be developed in order to integrate stability and reachable workspace of the robot while machining and traversing over highly irregular terrain. Coordination amongst multiple micro machining hexapod robots will also be studied to provide speed up through parallelization.