Published on Nov 25, 2014

On 11/21/2014, Kodlab and RHex visited the RAIR, Recycled Artist in
Residence and Revolution Recovery recycling center in Philadelphia.
RAIR creates awareness about sustainability through art and design and
is hosted at Revolution Recovery, a recycling center specializing in
construction and demoltion. We ran the robot up piles of drywall, wood
chips, concrete pieces, and some looser debris in an effort to see how
the robot would perform in "rubble."

RHex does well on both steep inclines and unstable surfaces, but the
combination is very challenging. Recently, we've been exploring robot
performance in different kinds of unstable materials such as sand

The other challenge we encountered at the recycling center was large
chunks of concrete that the robot couldn't clamber over. Jumping up
onto boulders that would otherwise be impossible to overcome was the
focus of our most recent PhD, Aaron Johnson's, thesis

We are planning to go back to the recycling center this winter and use
some of the insights from our desert trips and Aaron's work to overcome
the challenges we encountered during this trip.