Session: Rising Stars of Mechanical Engineering Celebration & Showcase

Paper Number: 148476

148476 - Dynamic Locomotion With Plasticity for Remote Sensing in Crawlspaces 

Crawlspaces are everywhere: caves, karst landscapes, shafts, ducts, ballast tanks, pipes, and grain elevators. Data from these environments holds immense scientific (biodiversity and geological processes), societal (archaeological and cultural remains), environmental (natural resources and mineral deposits), and health-security-economical (asset management and monitoring) significance. However, human operation in crawlspaces is costly, slow, and risky. Existing snake and insect robots can crawl in pipes and operate within centimeter-scale spaces; however, they are too slow or not completely autonomous. There is a pressing need for fast, agile, and efficient autonomous systems specifically designed for crawlspaces. Legged locomotion and multi-rotor flight show promise in addressing this challenge, having already revolutionized numerous remote sensing tasks by surpassing the capabilities of any other robot category. However, their operation remains limited to spacious tunnels. This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project supports research that seeks to harness the exceptional agility, efficiency, and speed of legged and rotary-wing robots and adapt it specifically for use in crawlspaces. The project designs a multi-modal robot with extensive locomotion plasticity capable of efficiently traversing extremely tight crawlspaces with agility through bipedal walking and flying. Furthermore, this project aims to promote gender equity in Northeastern University?s robotics program, a significant area of growth identified by school leadership.

Achieving efficient, agile, and fast legged-aerial locomotion in crawlspaces represents a new advancement in robot locomotion. Three knowledge gaps still exist in bridging legged locomotion and multi-rotor flight in crawlspaces: (1) Actuation challenges hinder the scalability of motion control performance, necessary for fast and precise foot placement, when transitioning from legged robots designed for open spaces to smaller robots operating in crawlspaces; (2) Instability issues arising from multi-rotors? air jets near surfaces pose flight immobilization risks; (3) Crawlspaces need several modes of locomotion and there is no systematic robot design framework to accommodate the requirements dictated by these modes. This project will engage in fundamental research to address these gaps, designing a bioinspired locomotion robot capable of walking, hovering, jumping, and running over inclined surfaces to push the operational envelope of mobile robots, making autonomous operations inside extremely tight crawlspaces possible. The project?s efforts revolve around robot and control design. This project?s key areas of innovation include (1) Introducing actuation design paradigms for small robots based on computational structure design for achieving comparable motion control performance seen in large robots; (2) Research and validation of new locomotion feats and underlying models and nonlinear controllers based on the integration of posture manipulation and thrust vectoring to overcome air jet risks in aerial robotics; (3) Co-designing robots and controls through generative design methods to accommodate conflicting requirements imposed by many locomotion modes.

Presenting Author: Alireza Ramezani Northeastern University

Presenting Author Biography: Alireza Ramezani is an assistant professor at the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Northeastern University (NU). He holds NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) visiting researcher position. Before joining NU in 2018, he was a post-doc at Caltech's Division of Engineering and Applied Science. He received his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, with Jessy Grizzle. His research interests are the design of bioinspired mobile robots with nontrivial morphologies (high degrees of freedom and dynamic interactions with the environment), analysis, and nonlinear, closed-loop feedback design of locomotion systems.
His designs have been featured in high-impact journals, including two cover articles in Science Robotics Magazine (2017 and 2021), listed as the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Science Magazine, and research highlights in Nature (2017). Alireza has received the NSF CAREER award and Breakthrough, Innovative, and Game-Changing (BIG) Idea Award from Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) Program for designing bioinspired locomotion systems to explore the Moon and Mars craters two times in 2020 and 2022. In 2022, Northeastern's team, under his leadership, won NASA's top award, ARTEMIS Award, at BIG Idea Challenge Forum. He is the recipient of JPL's Faculty Research Program Position. Alireza's research has been covered by over 200 news outlets, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, National Geographic, CNN, NBC, and Euronews.

Authors:

Alireza Ramezani Northeastern University