Tumbling robots provide the potential to produce increased mobility on smaller scales with respect to their size and/or complexity. In this paper we explore the frictional interactions between a tumbling robot and the terrain while climbing a single vertical step to illustrate the advantages of tumbling. We present a set of parametric configuration equations that express the relationships between the robot's configuration parameters (morphology, geometry, mass, etc.), the environmental/task parameters (step geometry, available coefficients of friction, etc.), and the performance parameters (step height). The required body coefficient of friction is examined in detail for idealized tumbling and wheel-tail robots.

In this paper we introduce tumbling, a relatively unexplored method of locomotion in which the robot utilizes net body rotations while ambulating. Tumbling for mobile robots is attractive in that it can enable increased mobility on smaller scales, often while reducing hardware requirements. As motivation for this interesting form of locomotion we provide a geometric analysis of a vertical step climbing task, one that tumbling robots perform well with respect to their size and complexity. In addition to our analysis we present results of a hardware experiment with a tumbling robot performing the task for varying combinations of frictional coefficients at the step and ground.

The desire for a high mobility-to-size ratio in mobile robots has led to the exploration of many new methods of locomotion, one of which is tumbling. We believe that tumbling has a great potential to produce high mobility-to-size ratios in miniature mobile robots. In this paper we discuss tumbling locomotion and introduce the Adelopod, a small two-armed tumbling robot recently developed at the University of Minnesota Center for Distributed Robotics. The Adelopod achieves high mobility with low hardware complexity, making it a desirable addition to any heterogeneous team of robots.

Tumbling is an exciting new area of robotic locomotion that takes advantage of ground-body interactions to achieve rich motions with minimal hardware complexity. The increased mobility of tumbling robots, however, comes at the price of increased control complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel method to handle the issues of tumbling locomotion which takes the problem and separates into locally independent subproblems. Our approach provides an intuitive geometric solution to the tumbling control problem without sacrificing performance. We provide a running example throughout the paper to help solidify the ideas presented.

The desire for a high mobility-to-size ratio in mobile robots has led to the exploration of many new methods of locomotion, one of which is tumbling. To the authors' knowledge, there are very few tumbling robots in existence and no formalized methods for their control. In this paper we begin addressing these issues by presenting an approach for deriving motion primitives for tumbling robots. We apply our method to the specific case of a two-armed tumbling robot and include the final derived motion primitives. Additionally we discuss in general the motion of tumbling robots and introduce 3 useful gaits derived from the resulting primitives of our approach.