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It is something hikers have known for a long time - and robots are set to be given hiking poles in a bid to make them more maneuverable.

The poles are packed with smart sensors and cameras to allow the robots to move.

Researchers hope to create robots that can easily scramble across debris in disaster zones.

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The robot uses two hiking poles to balance itself, meaning it can traverse rocky terrain in the same way a hiker does.

'Maintaining humanoid robot stability in unstruetured environments is nontrivial because robots lack human-like tactile sensing and require complex task-specific controllers to integrate information from multiple sensors,' the researchers, led by Oussama Khatib at Stanford, say.

'To deploy humanoid robots in cluttered and unstructured environments such as disaster sites, it is necessary to develop advanced techniques in both locomotion and control.

'We proposed to incorporate a pair of actuated smart staffs with vision and force sensing that transforms biped humanoids into tripeds or quadrupeds or more generally, SupraPeds.'

The 'smart staffs' effectively give the robot two extra legs.

The robot will use a specially designed 'smart staff' with sensors built into the tip

The robot's 'head' include a 3D panoramic camera to scan the surroundings.

Vision and force sensing in the staff allows them to be used as remote 'eyes'.

The staff can also change length as it is moved around.

So far the researchers have worked with a simulation of the robot, and say it was a success.

'The simulation results are presented to demonstrate that the proposed control framework can efficiently deal with multi-contact locomotion in 3D unstructured environments.

'This paper proposes to incorporate a pair of actuated smart staffs with vision and
force sensing that transforms biped humanoids into tripeds
or quadrupeds or more generally, SupraPeds. The concept
of SuprePeds not only improves the stability of humanoid
robots while traversing rough terrain but also retains the
manipulation capabilities.

The

The concept of SupraPeds not only improves the stability of humanoid robots while traversing rough terrain but also retains the manipulation capabilities.

The SupraPed platform includes a pair smart walking staffs, a whole-body multi-contact control and planning software system, and real-time reactive controllers that integrate both tactile and visual information.

Moreover, to bypass the difficulty of programming fully autonomous robot controllers, the SupraPed platform contains a remote haptic teleoperation system which allows the operator remotely give high level command.

In order to control the potentially numerous contact forces on SupraPeds, we develop a friction-consistent whole-body control framework that implements generic multi-contact control for arbitrary humanoids, which enables autonomous balancing while complying with friction constraints.