General Chemistry

Roboticists at UC Berkeley have designed a small robot that can leap into the air and then spring off a wall, or perform multiple vertical jumps in a row, resulting in the highest robotic vertical jumping agility ever recorded. The agility of the robot opens new pathways of locomotion that were not previously attainable. The researchers hope that one day this robot and other vertically agile robots can be used to jump around rubble in search and rescue missions. Duncan Haldane, a robotics Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, led the work. Haldane is a student in the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab of Ronald Fearing, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences. For the full story, visit: http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/12/06/wall-jumping-robot-is-most-vertically-agile-ever-built/ To compare the vertical agility of robots and animals, the researchers developed a new metric to measure vertical agility, defined as the height that something can reach with a single jump in Earth gravity, multiplied by the frequency at which that jump can be made. Salto’s robotic vertical jumping agility is 1.75 meters per second, which is higher than the vertical jumping agility of a bullfrog (1.71 meters per second) but short of the vertical jumping agility of the galago (2.24). The robot with the second highest vertical agility that the team measured is called Minitaur (1.1 m/s). “Developing a metric to easily measure vertical agility was key to Salto’s design because it allowed us to rank animals by their jumping agility and then identify a species for inspiration,” said Duncan Haldane, a robotics Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, who led the work. Haldane is a student in the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab of Ronald Fearing, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences. ...

Electrical Engineering 227BT, 001 - Fall 2014 Convex Optimization - Laurent El Ghaoui Creative Commons 3.0: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs

Watch how these UC Berkeley staff members are living by the words, ""We are accountable to each other"" -- one of Berkeley's five Operating Principles. Find out what you can do at http://operatingprinciples.berkeley.edu