Joint Research Team from Three Universities Develop Design Software for Robot Behaviour

A research team formed from professors from three universities is working on the development of new design software which is capable of predicting how a robot will behave before prototyping.

A computer science professor at the Rice University, WalidTaha, explained that the aim of the research was to devise methods to do a virtual testing before the prototype is built so that the blatant errors can be rectified. Taha pointed out that robot present a contrast for study, where they show capabilities of performing superhuman tasks but sometimes fail at toddler-level tasks. He added that the complexities of their physical behaviour go beyond the capacities of computer simulations.

Another researcher, Marcia O’Malley pointed out that by coming up with a method of virtual testing before the prototype stage, a lot of effort and cost can be saved while building a robot. She added that the process of building a prototype was an expensive and a laborious process since building a robot requires that the physical and digital world be merged together, so getting hit by some unexpected flaws at the end stages will lead to wasted effort and money. The team is working on an approach which will lead to a comprehensive system which the designers can use for end-to-end testing. For this they will have to design individual pieces of software which show good compatibility when merged together. A programming language expert from the Rice University is also part of the team; he will be assisting the team in building individual software components. He will be a bridge between the Mechatronics part and the Haptics Interface part. Testing of the software and making sure it suits day-to-day robotic design will be his primary responsibility in the research. The team focussing on mechatronic design will concentrate on developing two legged walking robots and other assistive devices. The software will be fed into the mechanical design that the mechatronic engineers come design. Efforts on creating the upper-body of the robot are already underway at the MAHI laboratory at the Rice University and the AMBER lab is working on developing the prosthetics for the lower body.