Manufacturing the main body of the C-Turtle requires a laser cutter and a heating press or iron. Horns, which connect the motors with the paper are created by a 3D printer. 3D printing the horns takes as much time as manufacturing all the other parts!

A locomotion strategy for the C-Turtle was learned with a reinforcement learning method both in the lab and in a desert environment. The used method, Group Factor Policy Search, requires only few executions to uncover an optimized movement strategy. The learning process takes usually about one hour of time.

This paper is published on Arxiv and can be found here. It will was presented on the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference at MIT this July. Find the poster here and a video of the presentation here.

@inproceedings{luck2017lab2desert,

title={From the Lab to the Desert: Fast Prototyping and Learning of Robot Locomotion},

author={Luck, Kevin Sebastian and Campbell, Joseph and Jansen, Michael Andrew and Aukes, Daniel M. and Ben Amor, Heni},

booktitle={Robotics: Science and Systems},

year={2017}

}

This paper will be presented on the Living Machines Conference at Stanford this June.

Find a pdf here.

@inproceedings{jansen2017biorobot,

  title={Bio-inspired Robot Design Considering Load-bearing and Kinematic Ontogeny of Chelonioidea Sea Turtles},

  author={Jansen, Andrew and Luck, Kevin Sebastian and Campbell, Joseph and Ben Amor, Heni and Aukes, Daniel M.},

  booktitle={Conference on Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems},

  year={2017},

  organization={Springer}

}