The new Rising Sprawl-Tuned Autonomous Robot (RSTAR) utilizes adjustable sprawling wheel legs attached to a body that can move independently and reposition itself to run on flat surfaces, climb over large obstacles and up closely-spaced walls, and crawl through a tunnel, pipe or narrow gaps. The innovative BGU robot was introduced at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2018) in Brisbane, Australia, May 21-25. "The RSTAR is ideal for search and rescue operations in unstructured environments, such as collapsed buildings or flooded areas, where it must adapt and overcome a variety of successive obstacles to reach its target," says Dr. David Zarrouk, a lecturer in BGU's Department of Mechanical Engineering, and head of the Bio-Inspired and Medical Robotics Lab. "It is the newest member of our family of STAR robots." Dr. Zarrouk and BGU student and robotics lab worker Liran Yehezkel designed RSTAR to function simply and reliably, change shape and overcome common obstacles without any external mechanical intervention. Its speed and relatively low energy consumption make the robot ideal for a broad range of applications that may require longer work time.

We're always impressed by the way David Zarrouk (a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev by way of UC Berkeley's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab) manages to extract a ton of functionality from the absolute minimum of hardware in his robots. In the past, we've seen clever designs like a steerable robot that only uses a single motor, and a multi-jointed robot arm that uses a traveling motor to actuate all of its degrees of freedom. At the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Brisbane, Zarrouk presented an update to STAR, the Sprawl-Tuned Autonomous Robot that we first wrote about in 2013. Called Rising STAR, or RSTAR, it takes the sprawling wheel-leg mobility and adds another degree of freedom that allows the body of the robot to move separately from the legs, changing its center of mass to help it climb over obstacles. RSTAR is the latest in Zarrouk's series of sprawling robots, designed to handle all kinds of terrain obstacles while minimizing cost of transport.