LocoMan: Extended Unitree robot dog to help with tidying up
Household robots should be inexpensive. A simple robot dog equipped with grippers could be useful in the household.
The LocoMan can do more than just shake children's hands with its grippers.
(Image: Carnegie Mellon University)
A research team from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), in collaboration with Google DeepMind and the University of Washington, has modified a Go1 robot dog from Unitree so that it can be used to help around the home in the future.
Robot dogs are mostly used for surveillance and rescue tasks. This is also because they are predestined to move on their four legs through any terrain. They are not really suitable as household helpers because they lack the appropriate manipulators - in the form of grippers, for example.
The CMU researchers have therefore developed special, lightweight manipulators for the Unitree-Go robot dog and integrated them into the front legs. These are grippers with two fingers that can also be moved in three degrees of freedom, as can be seen from the scientific paper "LocoMan: Advancing Versatile Quadrupedal Dexterity with Lightweight Loco-Manipulators", which has been published as a preprint on Arxiv.
To produce the manipulators, the scientists used four servos and various parts from the 3D printer. The grippers are versatile enough to open doors, pour drinks, insert cell phones for charging and clean up after small children.
The advantage of this is that a fairly inexpensive robot can be used for this purpose, which is significantly cheaper to build than a humanoid robot, for example. For example, a Unitree Go2 robot dog, the successor model to the Go1 used, costs around 1600 US dollars.
"While many are working on humanoid robots that look like humans and have the potential to learn directly from humans or even replace them in some tasks, we are focusing on robots that can complement and collaborate with humans," says Ding Zhao, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at CMU.
Simple object manipulation
LocoMan is already capable of performing simple tasks. These include opening doors, picking up objects and inserting plugs into sockets. The scientists tested this in a preschool class at the Cyert Center for Early Education. The robot was explained to the children and they were shown how to use it. The robot dog was correspondingly popular with them.
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However, LocoMan is not yet a huge help. The researchers are currently working on having him perform tasks autonomously. To do this, they want to integrate its perceptual abilities and intelligence planning skills into its full-body control.
The scientists working with Zhao assume that LocoMan will be ready in around three years' time to help around the house or in nurseries and clean up after children, for example. This opens the door to relatively inexpensive household robots.
The scientists are currently presenting their research work at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2024 (ICRA), which is being held in Yokohama, Japan, from May 13 to 17.
(olb)
