TITAN VII :
A Case Study of a Quadraped Walking Robot

The above picture was taken while I was a visiting student at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in the Summer of 1995 with Professor Hirose at the Mechano-Aerospace Robotics Laboratory. The visit was made possible by a scholarship from the National Science Foundation Summer Institute in Japan, which provides funding for about 65 U.S. Ph.D students to do collaborative research in Japan. Here is a photo of all of the friendly people at The Hirose Lab.

There are some fantastic robots being built by the laboratory, some of which include snake-like robots, wheeled robots, omni-directional vehicles, and walking robots. The TITAN VII was the latest effort in building a quadraped, walking robot suitable for construction tasks.

Although there wasn't enough time during the 10-week stay for me to make much of a contribution to the project, I was very grateful for the chance to meet so many nice people and see the robots up close.

References

	Shigeo Hirose, Kan Yoneda, and Hideyuki Tsukagoshi; TITAN VII: Quadraped Walking and Manipulating Robot on the Steep Slope, Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, Albequerque, NM (1997)
	Shigeo Hirose, Kan Yoneda, Kazuhiro Arai, Tomoyoshi Ibe; Design of Prismatic Quadruped Walking Vehicle TITAN VI, Proc. 5th INt. Conf. Advanced Robotics, Pisa, Italy ,, , pp.723-728 (1991)
	Shigeo Hirose, Kan Yoneda; Toward Development of Practical Quadruped Walking Vehicles, J. of Robotics and Mechatronics 6, pp.498/504 (1993)
	Kan Yoneda, Hiroyuki Iiyama, Shigeo Hirose; Sky-Hook Suspension Control of a Quadruped Walking Vehicle, Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, pp.999-1004 (1994)