Capturing Motion,
Crafting Stories

China is located in the southeast of the Eurasian continent, between the Pacific ring seismic belt and the Eurasian seismic belt. In recent years, earthquakes in Wenchuan, Beichuan, Ya 'an and Yushu of Qinghai have caused a large number of casualties. As the disaster area is often a piece of debris, the road is bad for walking, despite the intervention of rescue teams, some of the timely rescue equipment to save the lives of the dying, due to the large size and weight, need more human handling, it is still difficult to bring into the scene.

However, robot can solve this problem for people. In the early 21st century, Boston dynamics developed the Big Dog, a Hexapod Robot specially designed for the military. It can carry heavy loads of goods while climbing mountains and wading in water, and can run faster than humans. The "Big Dog" robot has a built-in computer that can adjust its posture according to its environment. It can be guided by a set course or operated remotely, making it of great military and disaster relief significance.

And our domestic researchers unwilling to lag behind likewise, several universities around the forefront of quadruped Bionic robot’s technology, carried out a four-legged animals and the environment interaction between mechanism and gait research, as well as emergency cases of emergency control method research, the establishment of a quadruped robotics bionic gait planning method, the dynamic stability judgment method and the outside world under the strong interference of the adaptive stable recovery method. Aiming at the hydraulic drive characteristics of four-legged robot with engine as power source, using the method of nonlinear control and overcoming the drastic change of robot hydraulic cylinder power, the dead zone features of electro-hydraulic servo valve, to realize the anti-disturbance servo control of the robotics, guarantee the stability of the motion of the robotics, the robot is studied in engine hydraulic pump load stable output nonlinear control method, as well as the high speed movement in the process of quadruped robotics leg support state stability of the nonlinear variable structure control switch, to realize the stability of the complex terrain environment quadruped bionic robotics control.

In the process of development, in order to accurately collect the robot’s gait information, The developers turned to NOKOV for technical support, hoping that with the help of NOKOV  optical 3D motion capture system, to capture the Bionic robot’s motion posture in the outdoor, so that they can adjust and optimize the obstacle crossing behavior.

At the test site of the national earthquake emergency rescue training base, NOKOV’s engineers set up 12 Mars 2H cameras on a tripod in an outdoor field of 14m long and 8m wide. Meanwhile, users attached reflective markers to the joints of the Bionic robot’s "trunk" and "limbs". The system collects the movement process of the array robotics at the sampling frequency of 60HZ, and derives the coordinate data of each node accurate to the submillimeter unit. The user then introduces these data into the developed special analysis tool for analysis, and confirms the robot’s attitude, so as to formulate the improvement plan.

The four-legged Bionic robot is still in the improvement test stage. According to its progress and requirements, the optical 3D motion capture system independently developed by NOKOV will continue to provide technical support for the application of domestic rescue robotics.