Applications of mobile ground robots demand high speed and agility while navigating in complex indoor environments. These present an ongoing challenge in mobile robotics. A system with these specifications would be of great use for a wide range of indoor inspection tasks. This paper introduces Ascento, a compact wheeled bipedal robot that is able to move quickly on flat terrain, and to overcome obstacles by jumping. The mechanical design and overall architecture of the system is presented, as well as the development of various controllers for different scenarios. A series of experiments with the final prototype system validate these behaviors in realistic scenarios.
@article{arxiv.2005.11435,
title = {Ascento: A Two-Wheeled Jumping Robot},
author = {Victor Klemm and Alessandro Morra and Ciro Salzmann and Florian Tschopp and Karen Bodie and Lionel Gulich and Nicola Küng and Dominik Mannhart and Corentin Pfister and Marcus Vierneisel and Florian Weber and Robin Deuber and Roland Siegwart},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.11435},
year = {2020}
}