IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2013 - 72

Robots
on the
Move
Versatilit y and Complexit y
in Mobile Robot Locomotion

By Chenghui Nie, Xavier Pacheco Corcho,
and Matthew Spenko

R

esearchers have come up with a diverse collection
of mobile robot designs with an effort to create
systems with superior locomotion characteristics.
This is true whether the robot is designed to
operate in terrestrial, aquatic, aerial, or scansorial
(i.e., vertical and inverted surfaces) domains. Despite the
creation of many successful (and unsuccessful) designs, no
formal study has systematically examined which
morphological features give robots high levels of mobility
and maneuverability.
Despite decades of designing mobile robots for locomotion in unstructured terrains, no system can operate with the
fluidity and ease of animals in these conditions. When compared with animals, mobile robots are neither very mobile
nor maneuverable. More generally, mobile robots suffer from
a lack of versatility, which extends the mobility and maneuverability concepts to include the ability to operate in and

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2013.2248310
Date of publication: 12 August 2013

72

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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DECEMBER 2013

© ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/OCIACIA

transition among multiple domains (e.g., terrestrial, scansorial, aerial, and aquatic).
There are several possible reasons for a lack of versatility in
mobile robots. In some cases, versatility may not be a design
goal. For example, an inspection robot designed to climb a specific pole most likely does not need to avoid obstacles or autonomously transition onto the pole. However, even when
versatility is a design goal, few mobile robots excel at it. We
argue that this is mainly the result of a design tradeoff that
requires engineered systems to maintain a level of simplicity
compared with biological systems. For example, animals can
have hundreds of actuators and millions of sensors. In contrast,
current hardware and the need to minimize the complexity of
control algorithms greatly limit the number of actuators and
sensors that are practical for mobile robots. Thus, achieving
versatility while maintaining simplicity is a difficult task.
To create a versatile mobile robot, a designer must typically increase the system's mechanical complexity (e.g., actuator number, joint number, joint type, and kinematic
configuration). Thus, we hypothesize that there is a positive
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2013

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