IMPASS: A Robot with Whegs

Posted 3 Nov 2005 at 00:28 UTC by steve

Dennis Hong writes, "I am a professor in Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech specializing in robot locomotion. Wanted to let you know about an interesting article on Discovery.com featuring one of our novel locomotion robots for high mobility. The robot is named IMPASS, which stands for Intelligent Mobility Platform with Active Spoke System, uses rimless wheels with spokes designed to individually lengthen and shorten according to its movement needs. It combines legs and wheels into one hybrid vehicle that can scramble over uneven courses and roll quickly over flat grades. Using intelligent motion planning to coordinate the motion of the active spokes, the actuated spoke wheels can also act like legs to climb over large obstacles and follow the contour of uneven surfaces of the terrain by making discrete contact with the ground as legged robots do." For other robots that use variants on the whegs concept see the Case Western Whegs robots, the well-known RHex, and CANipede created by Blueeyebop.