In the past few years, we have covered plenty of robots that can navigate uneven terrain. In certain cases, it is much easier for robots to move small obstacles out of the way. This video from Bethany Lu, Benjamin Tam, Navinda Kottege shows how legged robots traversing in a confined environment can use their legs to manipulate obstacles and continue on their path:
a hexapod robot autonomously generates manipulation trajectories for detected obstacles. Using a RGB-D sensor as input, the obstacle is extracted from the environment and filtered to provide key contact points for the manipulation algorithm to calculate a trajectory to move the obstacle out of the path.
[HT]