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RI SEMINAR -- Dinesh Pai



ABSTRACT

We have designed and built a new type of walking robot called a ``Platonic Beast'' with twelve joints. The robot is kinematically equivalent to a symmetric polyhedron, such as one of the Platonic solids (and hence its name), with identical multi-purpose limbs attached to its vertices.

The unique symmetry and regularity of the design provide several advantages. In the first part of my talk, I will discuss these design features, including robustness to toppling, novel gaits such as the rolling gait, and fault tolerance.

The complexities of such high degree of freedom robots demand new approaches to robot programming and planning. In the second part of my talk, I will describe our work in multiresolution motion planning on rough terrain, constructing performance measures for robots with closed loops, and robot programming with constraints.


Biographical Sketch

Dinesh K. Pai is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, and a fellow of the BC Advanced Systems Institute. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, and has been a member of the UBC faculty since 1991. His research interests are in robotics, modelling and simulation of multibody systems, programming high degree-of-freedom systems, locomotion in mobile robots and in a new family spherically symmetric robots, and automated assembly.


Christopher Lee | chrislee@ri.cmu.edu
Last modified: Tue Aug 29 11:34:48 1995