From Superinnovators 08/02/24
KIMLAB, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), unveiled a leg-wheel transformer bot named Ringbot earlier this week.
It offers a novel approach to robot mobility by integrating a monocycle mechanism with two x 3-DoF (degrees of freedom) legs that help the bot balance, steer, self-right and orientate.
To steer the bot sticks its legs out to slightly to one side, shifting the centre of gravity and producing a leaning motion which moves the trajectory left or right.
The design was inspired by the 1931 Cislaghi Motoruota monowheel modified by Giuseppe Govetosa, as well as other monocycles featured in Sci-Fi.
The Ringbot prototype was detailed in a paper published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics journal.
More info
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10423226
https://publish.illinois.edu/kimlab2020/
