Little Scout Robot Helps Big Robot Avoid Slippery Terrain

Posted on June 14, 2014

Researchers from UC Berkeley and ETH Zurich developed a dual robot strategy to help keep a larger robot from crossing a slick surface that might cause it to fall. A tiny robot, named VelociRoACH, moves ahead of the bigger robot (StarlETH) and acts as a scout. If the tiny robot encounters a slippery surface it stops and warns the big robot not to cross it.

The idea here is that smaller, cheaper robots could help protect a large expensive robot safe from danger. IEE Spectrum reports that the little scout robot is able to correctly classify terrain as safe or slippery 90% of the time.

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