Patrick Ross

Farmers are under growing pressure to increase production to feed a growing population, while at the same time considering environmental impact and constraints on land, water and labour. The increasingly larger farm machines cause significant soil compaction damage and are a single point of failure. Hence, in this project we developed the technology for small, inexpensive, cooperative robots for agriculture. This project was comprised of five themes: vision-based obstacle detection, vision-based [...]

 aka energy efficient legged locomotion The goal of this project was to create a new generation of legged robots that can traverse over rugged terrain in an energy-efficient manner. The team designed and tested a new energy efficient joint mechanism suitable for the robot’s knee. In particular, the joint’s stiffness can be changed on the fly so that it can cope with ground of varying hardness. We also demonstrated that [...]