My name is Jonathan Hurst and I am an Assistant Professor here at Oregon State in Mechanical,
Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering.
But, my work does span across Electrical and Computer Science as well.
We do robotics here in the lab and specifically physical interaction tasks.
The theme of the lab is understanding what we call passive dynamics, and that is the
mechanical components of the robot.
So you will see on this machine for example, there are springs.
These are fiberglass springs and these are the same purpose as your tendons there as
stretchy and flexible so when this thing is hopping up and down a lot of that energy is
going into and out of those springs as part of energy storage.
That really enables the behavior of the device if we did not these springs and there were
just motors attached to the leg it would not be physically possible to hop up and down
or to run efficiently, no matter what software you wrote, or no matter what sort of controls
you had.
Our big focus right now is building robots that can walk and run outside in the real
world over reasonably rugged terrain.
We are going to want robots to be always working with humans, around humans, in human environments,
and even on humans.
We are talking about like locomotion applies directly to prosthetic limbs, to exoskeletons
that can help disabled people get around, or for military applications so that the soldiers
can carry a lot more or go farther.
This is our very first prototype of Atreus, is the name of this machine.
It is a monopod robot, means just a single leg, it has been designed specifically to
match a very simple mathematical model which looks a lot like a pogo stick, just a mass
on top of a spring.
That model has been used to describe animal locomotion and has been investigated by a
lot of mathematicians and controls people.
What we would like to do is make a machine that matches this model as closely as possible
so we can control it, we can understand it and so on.
We built this based on what I learned doing my Ph.D. work at Carnegie Mellon University
at the robotics institute building Thumper here.
So Thumper is also a monopod, and this as part of my Ph.D. work I had hopping around
the room there.
Things that I learned from this we were able to apply to the design of Atreus.
Thumper was also built into a bipedal version, so just two of these legs exactly the same
put together.
That robot is named, Mabel and is at the University of Michigan.
One of the things that impressed me when I arrived here is that Oregon State students
know how to build stuff.
This place is really great for applied engineering.
Students can not only do the math and analysis but they know how to weld and machine and
put together a device that is going to function and work.
That has really been helpful, that works well.
It is a good fit for me; it’s a good fit for this lab.
That sort of culture doesn’t exist everywhere.
A lot of times now when I watch science fiction movies it is just ruined because all of the
technical parts are wrong.
It’s hard when it eliminates my suspension of disbelief, I can’t do it anymore, when
I say the whole premise of the movie is flawed so this is dumb.
We want to have robots moving and doing things, I like to be in here when there is a robot
hopping around and an arm moving over there and every week we are taking the thing outside
maybe to the practice football field once we have got this off the boom and in 3-D.
We are running the tests and the robots going to run around for a while then something breaks
so we bring it back to the lab to work on it for a week and then take it back out again.
That is where I want to be.