SHRIMP : High Mobility Wheeled Rover

Motivation A lot of outdoor tasks cannot yet be carried out by robots because of their poor mobility in rough terrain. Moreover, presence of stairs limits the indoor or urban use of mobile robotics.
For planetary exploration, highly autonomous robots are necessary to perform long range missions. Future missions will change from pure exploration to real exploitation. This will drastically modify the environment of space rovers, that will not encounter only rocks or dunes but also tranches, pipelines, regular steps or even furrows.

System description The Shrimp is a 6 wheeled rover. The total weight of this first prototype is 3.1 kg including 600 g of batteries and each wheel is powered by a 1.75 W DC motor.
Shrimp's structure (13k) Dimensions are L 60 cm x W 35 cm x H 23 cm; the ground clearance is 15 cm.
  • One wheel in front, monted on an articulated fork.
  • One wheel in rear directly connected to the body
  • Two weels are monted on two lateral bogies
    The only actuators are the motorized wheels and the Shrimp adapt purely passively its structure during the motion to insure its stability. This allow a very simple control strategy as well as a low power consumption.
    The secret of its high mobility lies in the parallel architecture of the front fork and of the bogies (see the video or the slides to undertand why).


    • Capabilities

    In a structured environment, this rover is able to ovecome steps of twice its wheel diameter and can climb regular stairs.

    Outdoors, Shrimp shows excellent offroad abilities overcoming rocks even with a single bogie. With an frontal inclination of 40 degrees, Shrimp is still able to ovecome obstacles.


    Multimedia See the video of the shrimp in action presented at ICRA'2000 !
  • MPEG video, (7.6Mb)
  • Real G2 video 2 min 44(high resolution, 4.4Mb, LAN connection)
  • Real G2 video 2 min 44(low resolution, 700kb, 56k modem)
    How does Shrimp turn ? See a short video :
  • MPEG video, (362kb)
    • Publication T. Estier, Y. Crausaz, B. Merminod, M. Lauria, R.Piguet, R. Siegwart,
    "An innovative Space Rover with Extended Climbing Alilities",
    Proceedings of Space and Robotics 2000, Albuquerque, USA, February 27-March 2, 2000.
  • get pdf

    • Partners
  • BlueBotics SA, Switzerland. (Markets the next generation : the Shrimp III robot)
  • Your company ! If you need a special design for a particular application, feel free to contact us.


    • Contact
  • Thomas Estier, Research Assistant
  • Pierre Lamon, PhD-Student
  • Michel Lauria, PhD-Student
  • Ralph Piguet, Electronics Engineer
  • Grégoire Terrien, Research Assistant
  • Prof. Roland Siegwart, Autonomous Systems Lab leader
    • Related Links
  • A very nice LEGO version of the Shrimp robot done by Mario Ferrari.
  • Another great LEGO version of the Shrimp robot done by Mark Crosbie. There is also a video !

  • Overview of Field and Space Robotics activities at ASL
  • ROBOLINKS, the directory on robotics of Robotbooks
  • Yahoo! Technology Full Coverage: Robots and Robotics
  • JPL Robotics Activities (Jet Propulsion Lab, NASA)

     
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    Last update: 25.09.02/jww