Intelligent Rising Sprawl Tuned Autonomous Robot

Miniature crawling or driving robots have been developed in recent years for off-road tasks such as search and rescue, excavation, and reconnaissance. Their small dimensions, low weight, and high navigability enable their deployment in large numbers to quickly inspect large areas. There are some examples of palm-sized robots that we designed and created that can crawl or drive, including instances from a particular family of Sprawl-Tuned Autonomous Robots (STAR), i.e., STAR [1] and Rising-STAR [2]. These robots can actively adjust their sprawl angle to change the geometry between wheels and "whegs" in different planes. Using their unique configuration, these robots can move on varying terrain surfaces and traverse obstacles. The Rising-STAR has been simulated and examined with different types of machine learning algorithms [3, 4], to improve its abilities in different aspects.