Aims and tasks
During the past years big efforts have been made to devolop walking and climbing machines in Europe and especially in Germany, particularly to open new fields of application. Compared to wheeled vehicles walking machines show the advantage that they can act in highly unstructured terrain without having prepared this terrain in advance by streets or rails. Examples for the application are planetary exploration, the use in forestery and agriculture, the exploration of non-accessible terrain like vulcano craters etc. Climbing robots are used for the inspection of sewersystems, tanks as well as for the inspection of the inner layer of atomic power stations.
The research work of the past years revealed that productive machines can only be developed and constructed if the work is based on the cooperation of researchers and developers from different fields of research. For this purpose the knowledge of biology, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and informatics plays is of big importance.
For this reason the working group is intended for researchers and developers from different disciplines working on the research of natural and mechanical walking, investigating methods and tools coming from electronics or information processing which can be useful for this field of research or constructing real walking machines.
The aim of this working group is to bring together researchers and developers working on this field of research for guaranteing a scientific exchange. Furthermore it is strived for the realization of a close cooperation with the european working group for walking and climbing robots CLAWAR. A description concerning this group as well as a extensive list of addresses and actual research projects are given on our www-pages of the walking machine catalogue.
Everybody who is interested in this fascinating field of research is kindly invited to participate on this working-group.
Planned activities
The following activities will be tackled very soon respectivly are planned for the working-group:
Further activities will be realized in agreement with the participants of the working group.
Contact
For further information please contact the working group leader Dr. Berns.
Dr. Karsten Berns
Interactive Diagnoses and Service Systems (IDS)
Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI)
Haid-und-Neu-Str. 10-14 76131 Karlsruhe Germany
Tel: ++49/(0)721-9654-202, Fax: ++49/(0)721-9654-209 E-mail: berns@fzi.de
see also the GERMROB www page http://wwwipr.ira.uka.de/~germ_rob/