Wheelbot nominated as award finalist at top robotics conference
Our recent research article The Wheelbot: A Jumping Reaction Wheel Unicycle being published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) has been nominated for the "Best Entertainment and Amusement Paper Award" at IROS 2022. The IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) is one of the largest and most impacting robotics research conferences worldwide. Out of ca. 1700 papers presented at IROS 2022, three were awarded as finalists for the "IROS Best Entertainment and Amusement Paper Award".
The Wheelbot is the first symmetric reaction wheel unicycle robot that can jump up on its wheels from any configuration after toppling. While the robot is simple in its mechanical design, it possesses challenging dynamical properties that renders it an ideal platform for research evolving around data-driven and nonlinear control. Moreover, the Wheelbot shall assist in introducing students to robotics and control theory. The Wheelbot is used as a testbed in different research projects at DSME.
For the Wheelbot's development, Prof. Sebastian Trimpe and his team at RWTH Aachen University joined forces with Jonathan Fiene, head of the ZWE Robotics laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS). Lead researcher behind the development of the Wheelbot is A. René Geist who was a Ph.D. student at the Intelligent Control Systems Group of the MPI-IS under supervision of Prof. Trimpe and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at DSME.
A. René Geist presented the work in person at the IROS conference in Kyoto.
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