ResiRob
Multimodal resilient robots
The objective of the ResiRob project (2025-2028) is to give these multimodal mobile robots new crucial capabilities in terms of resilience for evolutions in natural environments. Resilience is the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from unexpected difficulties. When applied to mobile robotics, resilience can be seen as the ability of robots to absorb shocks when flying or rolling, to collide with obstacles without irreversible structural damages, or to be impacted by flying objects without crashing. Such physical survival is fundamental for robots whenever they operate into an unstructured environment, and the implications of a collision can be of high importance with for instance the inability to find survivors during a search and rescue mission, or financial repercussions with hardware destruction.
The heart of the ResiRob project is precisely to create new deformable robots that will not only absorb shocks but also sense collisions with appropriate proprioception to generate relevant trajectories, while offering multimodal locomotion capability.