During last month's UCLA game, Purdue’s men basketball welcomed two robot dogs to the court for halftime. The dogs, Aura and Halo, are part of robotic research which aims to help humans during catastrophes.
“These can get in where humans can’t,” said Manav Kulshrestha, a Ph.D. student researcher. “They do this while not putting first responders in harm’s way.”
The core idea is to help people, whether it be injured people, those living through catastrophes or just transporting things from one point to another.
Apoorva Vashisth, another Ph.D. student researcher, said their current focus is on navigating harsh terrain.
“The main aim there is that the robots can understand which obstacles they can move out of their way to clear a path for others to follow,” Vashisth said.
Besides the dogs, the researchers are also working on a “Roomba-like” robot, as described by Aniket Bera, professor of computer science at Purdue. This robot serves a different purpose to the dogs, focusing more on human interaction with its two arms rather than simply navigation.
The researchers also created a larger dog robot featuring a grasping arm coming out of its back.
“(The ‘Roomba-like’ robot) has two arms, so it can do things much more efficiently than this single arm one,” Bera said. “They all have capabilities that are somewhat different. This big (robot) cannot go into small or difficult areas because it's difficult to carry and difficult to charge.”
Despite the difficulties, each robot is specifically created for a different task. The robots’ different shapes play a big part in their function.
For example, Bera said the robot dogs’ legs can go into difficult terrain, like rocks, soil and grass, that wheels may get stuck in.
He said also the small robot dogs also have issues with charging because the dogs may need eight or 10 hours to accomplish their tasks, which is something the team is working on.
While the dogs themselves have come a long way, so has public opinion.
“I remember when we first got them people were more scared of them,” Bera said. “Right now, they … want to pet them. I think that creepiness is going away for most people … (they’re) too cute to take over the world.”
For these researchers, the future holds more studies on the robots in store, but Bera is looking toward something a little more human.
“Eventually, we can replace (the current) arms with human-like arms,” he said. “We are getting a humanoid robot, hopefully in a couple of months.”
