MSC Software Corporation

Search and rescue is extremely hazardous work and there are some areas which cannot be reached by humans because the danger is too great. A new generation of robots is being designed to address these challenges. While there are a number of different potential search and rescue robot designs, one of the most interesting is a four legged robot being designed by the Dynamic Legged Systems Lab led by Dr. Claudio Semini (Italian Institute of Technology) to perform dynamic tasks such as walking in rugged terrain, carrying heavy loads, climbing hills and even jumping and running.

Advanced Industrial Automation Lab engineers instead used Adams and MSC Nastran to simulate the performance of the robot in a fraction of the time that would have been required for the analytical approach. Each robot leg contains about 450 parts. IIT engineers merged these components into just a few rigid bodies, one for each moving part of the structure

• Up to 90% correlation between physical tests and simulations on both robot displacements and contact forces
• Researchers are now able to evaluate different folding methods and new package designs with the simulation model
• Including flexibility into Adams model further increases the accuracy of predicting complex robotic behavior