AUTONOMOUS NAVIGATION OF A 5 GRAM CRAWLING MILLIROBOT IN A COMPLEX ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

We present the Medic robot: a novel 5-gram autonomous crawling and climbing millirobot designed to navigate through dark, cluttered, confined and electrified environments. Due to payload constraints, all sensing is performed by a single lowresolution camera and processing is split between an onboard unit and a base station. We present an integrated object detector, localizer, and planner that have been successfully demonstrated to enable the millirobot to determine its position within the environment, plan and navigate the most efficient path between user-specified start and goal positions, and recover from stuck conditions. 1.