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.

Emblematic examples of resilient or multimodal robots and morphing structures. A) A multimodal mobility Morphobot [1]. B) Actuated expandable structure for a flying robot [14]. C) Impact resilient quadrotor [15] D) Crash resilient frame for a quadcopter [16]. E) Air ground robot SPIDAR [17]. F) Collision-resilient aerial robot with tensegrity structure [18]. G) Active joints applied to a deformable robot.