Johnson Moves Research to How Robots Climb Rocky Terrain

The desert is a tricky place for robots to navigate - just ask Aaron Johnson. The assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University recently won the Army Research Office's Young Investigator Award for his work designing intelligent interaction between robots and their environments. Johnson's experiences testing robots in the Mojave Desert as a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania cemented his interest in getting robots to overcome challenging terrain, and he started thinking about jumping and leaping behaviors. "It was clear that we could handle some terrain but not others-the bots had particular difficulty with areas where the rocks were bigger than their legs," said Johnson, who earned his bachelor's degree from CMU's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He will apply these ideas to his newly funded project as he investigates ways to model uncertainty when faced with rocky hills. Johnson's research applies to all types of challenging terrain, but this project will focus specifically on getting robots to climb steep, rocky hills.