I'm happy to introduce Erle-Spider, a new drone with legs powered by Ubuntu that uses the Robot Operating System (ROS) at its core.
Erle-Spider shows just how easy it is to build an essentially complex robot, when powered by our robotic brain (Erle-Brain) and adding functionality from the Ubuntu-based app store. This new robot is literally a computer with legs that has 18 degrees of freedom in total. It will be released as an open source and a cost-effective platform, with the aim of being the premier legged drone for education, research and inspection tasks where we see a huge potential in hard-to-reach places, such as pipes or disaster areas.
Many behaviors implemented on Erle-Spider have been inspired by the fantastic work that APM developers do and it's our goal to make it compatible with many of the existing tools that this community and the Dronecode Foundations supports. It will be possible to program autonomous missions with it through "Mission Planner" or "APM Planner 2.0" while at the same time, simulation will be possible using several of the tools supported by the Open Source Robotics Foundation (the guys behind ROS).
A short clip is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWrvqt4ZCj0. ;
Erle-Spider will be launched soon so If you're interested we'd recommend subscribing to stay tuned. More information available at Erle-Spider one pager.
Comments
@Fnoop Dogg, ours just happen to have 6 :).
Thanks @Biriuk Ivan. We got good inspiration from Crab. That was a work well done. The ROS architecture is nicely laid out and well abstracted. It's specially simple to build on top of the existing ROS nodes which proofs the huge potential of using ROS for building robots and drones.
Good stuff! This is very similar to Crab (Hexapod Robot).
Isn't this technically Erle-Ant? Spiders have 8 legs :)
desperate to see APM CROWLER code "ARDUCROWLER"
Yep, pretty cool stuff. I have a hankering to add a spider to my pile of unassembled vehicles. :)
Can we combine ArduRover with spider locomotion? How awesome would that be...
Good Job Victor :)
Fixed. Thanks Robert.
Video is private