The Bio-Inspired SCORPION Robot: Design, Control & Lessons Learned

This chapter will review the SCORPION robot project (Kirchner et al., 2002). The goal of the SCORPION robot project was the development of a very robust eight-legged robot, which is capable to traverse very steep and unstructured terrain without high-level planning or using complex exteroceptive sensors, e.g., a laserscanner. The SCORPION robot is now a field-tested system which was successfully deployed in various kinds of outdoor terrain (e.g. rocky, sandy). Currently, the SCORPION robot design is in discussion to be used in future extraterrestrial exploration missions into steep craters on the Moon or Mars (Spenneberg et al., 2004). In the following sections we will describe the steps we undertook to achieve this goal. In Section 2, we will describe the different mechatronical design steps and discuss briefly the problems faced and the solutions developed. Then we will discuss in section 3 the different possibilities for a control approach of a legged outdoor robot and describe the developed hybrid bio-inspired approach (Spenneberg, 2005a), which combines posture control with CPG (Central Pattern Generator)-based control and reflex control. Subsequently, we will discuss the achieved performance. Concluding, we will discuss the lessons learned and future steps to utilize the full potential of walking and climbing robots (section 4).