Projects and Movies

ד"ר דוד זרוק

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Dr. David Zarrouk

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Homepage Projects and movies Publications Honors and Awards Teaching and Public Activities

Youtube movies: My movies UC Berkeley Biomimetics Lab. movies

Single motor worm robot at IEEE Spectrum

STAR robot: IEEE Spectrum techcrunch popsci

1STAR robot: IEEE Spectrum

Current projects

(STAR is a Sprawl Tuned Autonomous Robot capable of changing its sprawl angle in order to crawl over different surfaces and obstacles, (IEEE, ICRA 2013) (STAR movie

,STAR.V3 acrobatics

STAR onboard camera

This robot has a variable leg sprawl angle in the transverse plane to adapt its stiffness,

height, and leg-to-surface contact angle. This robot is designed to slide in order to

reduce contact forces with the ground. Contact angle and normal contact forces are

substantially reduced when the sprawl angle is low, and the velocity increases over

smooth surfaces, with stable running at all velocities up to 5.2 m/s (Oct. 2012). Due to

its passive stability STAR does not need to be run in alternating tripods and can be

steered without becoming unstable. Zarrouk et al. IEEE ICRA 2013.

Single Actuator Robot:

A robot that has a single actuator but can crawl straight and rotate to either

direction (movie). (Mechanical explanation and simulation results published

in IEEE IROS 2012 PDF). More on the robot will appear soon.

the input signal of the single motor which causes the robot to rotate.

Top and bottom views of the robot. The robot has compliant center legs

Hexapod Locomotion Analysis:

Better in-plane locomotion modeling is achieved by taking into account the sliding of the compliant legs (to appear)

Cost of transport (COT) of robot:

Cost of transport of the robot allows to determine the work range of the robot and the

optimum velocity profile and path of the robot (IEEE ICRA 2013)

Previous projects

Single Actuator Worm Robots:

Inchworm and earthworm robot actuated using a single motor PDF movieThese worm robots are some of the fastest worm robots that exist (5cm/s) and the most efficient ones

in terms of energy requirements. They use a single motor and the inchworm can climb vertically an

estimated 300 meters using 4 off the shelf AAA battery. We designed a larger and smaller version of

both the earthworm and inchworm. Zarrouk et al. ASME JMD 2012.

Worm locomotion over compliant surfaces: when robots run on compliant surfaces they tend to "dance forward and backward" (paper1 PDF paper 2 PDF)

The four cell earthworm makes one step forward and three back as predicted by analysis and simulations