SpaceBok, quadruped robot, Switzerland

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spacebok.ch

facebook.com/spaceboketh

Leader - Hendrik Kolvenbach

 

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"Jumping space robot flies like a spacecraft"

July 4, 2019

 

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Meet SpaceBok

Published on Jul 6, 2019

Astronauts on the Moon found themselves hopping around, rather than simply walking. Switzerland’s SpaceBok planetary exploration robot has followed their example, launching all four legs off the ground during tests at our technical heart.

SpaceBokis a quadruped robot designed and built by a Swiss student team from ETH Zurich and ZHAW Zurich, currently being tested using Automation and Robotics Laboratories (ARL) facilities at our technical centre in the Netherlands. The robot is being used to investigate the potential of ‘dynamic walking’ and jumping to get around in low gravity environments.

SpaceBok could potentially go up to 2 m high in lunar gravity, although such a height poses new challenges. Once it comes off the ground the legged robot needs to stabilise itself to come down again safely – like a mini-spacecraft.So, like a spacecraft. SpaceBok uses a reaction wheel to control its orientation

 

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Towards jumping locomotion for quadruped robots on the Moon

Published on Aug 2, 2019

This video demonstrates how to achieve repetitive jumping locomotion with the quadruped robot SpaceBok at lunar gravity. The robot uses a reaction wheel to control its attitude and parallel springs in the legs to jump efficiently.

Authors: Hendrik Kolvenbach, Elias Hampp, Patrick Barton, Radek Zenkl and Marco Hutter
2019 IEEE/RSJInternational Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Macau, China

 

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Article "How Do You Make a Robot Walk on Mars? It’s a Steep Challenge"
Meet SpaceBok, a little, four-legged machine that’s taking the first steps toward walking on the Red Planet’s brutal terrain.

by Matt Simon
June 14, 2021

 

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Traversing steep and granular Martian analog slopes with a dynamic quadrupedal robot

Jun 10, 2021

We present experimental work on traversing steep, granular slopes with the dynamically walking quadrupedal robot SpaceBok. We validate static and dynamic locomotion with two different foot types (point foot and passive-adaptive planar foot) on Mars analog slopes of up to 25°(the maximum of the testbed). Tests were performed at the ExoMars locomotion validation testbed located at RUAG, Switzerland. The soil used in this experiment is called "ES-3", a martian soil analog (coarse, poorly-sorted, well-graded sand).

Authors: Hendrik Kolvenbach, Philip Arm, Elias Hampp, Alexander Dietsche, Valentin Bickel, Benjamin Sun, Christoph Meyer and Marco Hutter

Field Robotics, 2021
https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01974