Aditya Sarpata, a robotics engineer at Nimble, talks with John Koetsier on NEXT about building a working TARS-inspired robot as a research project.
Sarpata wanted to test whether TARS’s rolling gait could work in real life. He began building a prototype after joining Nimble, where he was writing code during a period of company growth. The hobby project became a research project as he found that established legged-locomotion principles could explain the robot’s movements.
Sarpata describes rolling as an efficient way to travel and walking as useful for stairs and other terrain that wheels struggle with. His robot can walk upright on two legs, walk on four, and roll. To keep its center moving steadily while rolling, it changes leg length, using four compact actuators with two degrees of freedom each and a rack-and-pinion mechanism.
The movie’s arms extend from the robot’s structure, but Sarpata says they are not very practical. He also says the movie design would be too mechanically stressed to roll reliably without changes. His real-world version uses curved foot plates and other modifications.
Sarpata says the project taught him not to dismiss an idea before trying it. He connects its walking and rolling behaviors to established models, including passive dynamics and rimless-wheel dynamics. At Nimble, he says the shared robotics principles include controls and dynamics, while warehouse robots also need high throughput and reliability.
Sarpata says TARS grew beyond a hobby project and led to a paper presented at Humanoids, where he was a Mike Stilman Award finalist. He is now exploring a roughly one-foot-tall Baymax-inspired robot made with soft parts and without a rigid internal structure. His research focuses on the trade-offs between soft links, accuracy, and simpler mechanisms.
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