Dehghani, H. et al. Semi-autonomous locomotion for diagnostic endoscopy device 1. Journal of Medical Devices 9, 030931, https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4030562 (2015). Appleyard, M. N. et al. The measurement of forces exerted during colonoscopy. Gastrointestinal Endoscopy 52, 237–240, https://doi.org/10.1067/mge.2000.107218 (2000). When BALLU’s speed drops considerably, it can recover it through a large footstep. As mentioned in Section 3.5, if it can position both feet forward, the further the feet are put, the larger acceleration the body gains when it reaches the apex. During this sequence, BALLU can recover both height and velocity, and move on to the next sequence of motions. 3.5 Footstep Position Selection Because of the complexity and uncertainty of the system, rather than conducting formal nonlinear system analysis, BALLU’s walking performance is first qualitatively assessed by analyzing the pelvis’ trajectories and phase plot.

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What is just as important as buoyancy for BALLU is a drag. Because the robot is lightweight yet the body takes a large portion, drag force plays a nontrivial role in BALLU’s orientation. Consequently, the drag forces for the transitional and rotational directions with the robot’s X, Y, and Z-axes were calculated using computational fluid dynamics software. Because the lateral distance between two feet keeps the robot from rotating in the roll direction, only the rotations in the pitch and yaw direction are taken as the domain variables for the computation. Considering the rate of change in the pitch and yaw directions that BALLU normally takes, the drag force was computed over ±40deg for the pitch and ±5deg for the yaw angle with the unit speed. The basic concept of SPID involves the design of the double balloon and the SPA. Each part was constructed and tested before the assembly to avoid any issue in the final functional outcomes. A colonic phantom was designed and constructed to test the locomotion performance based on the size and configuration of the average human colon anatomy. The following sections report on the design details of each component. Balloon for anchorage Lim, J. et al. One pneumatic line based inchworm-like micro robot for half-inch pipe inspection. Mechatronics 18, 315–322, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mechatronics.2008.05.007 (2008). Ghassemi, S., and Hong, D. (2016). Feasibility study of a novel robotic system BALLU: Buoyancy assisted lightweight legged unit. In 2016 IEEE-RAS 16th International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids). New Jersey, IEEE. 144. doi:10.1109/humanoids.2016.7803268 Liang ZP, Wang XY, Lin QZ, Chen F, Chen JY (2018) A novel multi-objective co-evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition approach. Appl Soft Comput J 73:50–66Hu FJ, Lin JW, Gu HJ (2019) Dynamic linear predictive optimization of flexible robot profiling MFA model. J Sens 2019:1–9

balloon robot steals the show at California tech Walking balloon robot steals the show at California tech

F hip, r is the force from the leg at the hip in the radial direction connecting the hip and the foot, and F hip, t is in the tangential direction. Tavana M, Li ZJ, Mobin M (2016) Multi-objective control chart design optimization using NSGA-III and MOPSO enhanced with DEA and TOPSIS. Expert Syst Appl 50:17–39

Data Availability Statement

Since the concept of BALLU was first unveiled by Ghassemi and Hong (2016), there have been further studies of robot platforms adopting helium balloons and leveraging their buoyancy force. One noticeable work is the Giacometti Arm designed by Takeichi et al. (2017), a 20-m helium balloon supported robot arm designed for inspection tasks. This manipulator has 20 joints driven by pneumatic and thin artificial muscles. Among mobile platforms, GerWalk by Yamada and Nakamura (2018) is one that is very resemblant to BALLU. Because its body is a helium balloon, it is able to easily traverse stairs and other obstacles with stability. Nayar et al. (2019) of JPL also proposed a balloon based walking robot for Mars exploration. Ahn, M. S., Chae, H., Noh, D., Nam, H., and Hong, D. (2019a). Analysis and noise modeling of the intel realsense d435 for mobile robots. In 2019 16th International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots (UR) (New Jersey, IEEE), 707–711. doi:10.1109/urai.2019.8768489