Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 3 No. 2 Summer 2018 | Page 11

The evolution of bipedal robots may follow a road once traveled by living species – the inclusion of a tail. just like a human to keep it from falling.” In the Robotics and Mechatronics Lab of Pinhas Ben-Tzvi, associate professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering, the tail has become a capti- vating solution for the problem of bipedal and quadrupedal robot stabilizing and maneuvering. The problem is that with legs so com- plex, they are large and very expensive, requiring not only additional joints and motors, but also complex control algorithms and increased computational load. With the addition of a robotic tail, Ben-Tzvi believes the legs can get much simpler, and the robot lighter, easier to design, and less expensive. “If you’ve seen robotic quadrupeds, they are very big and very expensive, with articulated legs incorporating multiple degrees of freedom,” said Ben-Tzvi. “The machines use the leg’s multiple degrees of freedom to maneuver and stabilize so if they are pushed from the side, the legs ad- “Instead of four leg mechanisms each with multiple degrees of freedom and with complicated controls, we can make the legs with a single degree of freedom, and one motor per leg that will allow the en- tire mechanism to run forward, but really fast,” explained Ben-Tzvi. “The legs take MOMENTUM SUMMER 2018 PAGE 11