Introducing MiP™ Arcade: the evolution of WowWee's award-winning robot that brings the game room to your home. Discover everything your MiP™ Arcade can do at miparcade.com. Color Match: Match colors in the app to MiP™ Arcade's chest light. How many colors can you match before time runs out? We have presented M4 and showcased the advantages of considering morpho-functional appendages that can be repurposed to manipulate redundancy to enhance locomotion plasticity and achieve payload scalability. A few works that previously applied appendage repurposing in their designs achieved limited locomotion plasticity. Instead, in this paper, we demonstrated that our robot can (1) fly, (2) roll, (3) walk, (4) crouch, (5) balance, (6) tumble, (7) scout, and (8) loco-manipulate objects by switching the functionality of appendages between wheels, legs, hands, or thrusters. In addition, we demonstrated M4 can drive on steep slopes and vault over large obstacles if other modes were not applicable. We showed M4’s design is scalable and can substantiate fully autonomous, self-contained, multi-modal operations. This modal diversity and level of autonomy have not been reported in multi-modal locomotion before and differentiates our robot from existing platforms. To substantiate the claimed locomotion plasticity in M4, we performed several experiments, including, wheeled locomotion, flight, MIP, crouching, object manipulation, quadrupedal-legged locomotion, thruster-assisted MIP over steep slopes, and tumbling over large obstacles. In addition, to show M4’s design is scalable and can achieve payload capacities that support self-contained operations, we tested fully autonomous multi-modal path-planning using onboard sensors and computers in M4. A summary of these experiments is shown in Figs. 5– 8. Our results suggest that redundancy manipulation using morphing appendages can present a powerful design view that not only can yield impressive locomotion plasticity within a single substrate but also can support crossing the boundaries of multi-substrate locomotion that involve conflicting requirements such as ground and air. We found that appendage repurposing is an effective tool for creating scalable designs when conflicting requirements exist. For instance, the increased thrust-to-weigh ratio achieved by repurposing all appendages to the thrusters in M4 can quadruple when all appendages are repurposed to the thruster since the payload remains fixed. Remarkably, biologists reported these observations before; however, the robotic demonstrations remained unexplored or were not explored to the level showcased in this paper.

Battle: Last MiP Standing - Challenge other MiPs head to head and see who is the Last MiP Standing. He also has his own in-built emotions and personality so be nice to him and he will be your new best friend, but get on his bad side and you will have one angry robot on your hands! Want to see all out robot warfare? You and a friend can pit your MiP’s against each other to see which robot comes out on top. In the MIP maneuver (Fig. 5b), we demonstrated that M4 could repurpose its front and rear appendages to generate the external forces required to stand up and sit down entirely independently without external support. The maneuver provides two immediate mobility advantages: increased reach (or higher vantage point) and enhanced traction forces. The first advantage can be leveraged to tumble over large obstacles that cannot be handled with legged and wheeled mobilities. The second advantage can be employed to travel on steep slopes, similar to how birds use their wings and legs collaboratively to travel over inclined surfaces (i.e., WAIR maneuver). On these steep slopes, large traction forces are required. These forces cannot be substantiated by wheeled mobility. The next icon in the menu is MiP cans. These are little personality chips. If you feed one to MiP, he will take on that personality for a few seconds. You can make him happy, sad, confused, farty, sleepy and more!

Birds such as Hoatzins and Chukars manipulate redundancy in their locomotion apparatuses as well. Juvenile Hoatzins showcase wing-assisted walking 39 to move up vertical or steep slopes to refuge and dodge danger (Fig. 3c). They repurpose the wings and shape-shift the articulated body to extract leg functions from their wings and achieve quadrupedal locomotion. Young Hoatzin nestlings retain functional claws in their wings which helps them to manifest quadrupedal locomotion and even climb in the vegetation. Shake Shake: Shake MiP™ Arcade as fast as you can! The more you shake MiP™ Arcade, the higher the virtual shake meter fills up. Can you complete before time runs out! where \({{{{{{{\bf{x}}}}}}}}\in {{\mathbb{R}}} APPROXIMATE LOCATION (NETWORK BASED) - We also use this for reporting of anonymous statistics using Flurry to help us improve the MiP app for you.

View 2: Redundancy- In this view, multi-functionality is achieved by brute-force approaches based on the plurality of appendages that can deliver one function only. Hence, the appendages are not shared among different modes and are fixated on non-morphing bodies. Note that by redundancy we refer to the number of appendages involved in a locomotion mode. We label it redundant if more appendages are required than the minimum number needed for that mode. Therefore, redundancy in actuated joints does not render a system redundant. Consider human bipedal locomotion that consists of two legs each comprising a plural of muscles (analog to robot actuators) that would allow the leg to deliver different functions. In our view, this example is not redundant. ACCESS BLUETOOTH SETTINGS AND PAIR WITH BLUETOOTH DEVICES - We use Bluetooth to communicate with MiP. This is required for the app to function correctly. Meet MiP - the first robot which can be controlled using GestureSense technology, so wherever you move your hand your own little robot buddy will move as well. Push your hand or an object towards him and watch him react – it’s like he can sense you’re there! This work presents the design and control of a versatile multi-modal robot called M4 shown in Fig. 1. The contributions of this work are multi-fold. First, we show a significant modal diversity not reported in the literature. Inspired by animals with considerable locomotion plasticity, such as birds, the M4 robot can perform various modes of locomotion by redundancy manipulation through appendage repurposing. M4 repurposes its appendages with its transforming body and switchable shrouded propellers to switch to an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV), mobile inverted pendulum (MIP), unmanned aerial system (UAS), thruster-assisted MIP, legged locomotion, and loco-manipulation in MIP mode. Second, by repurposing the mobility components in M4, we achieve a scalable design that supports fully autonomous and self-contained operations. We show the robot possesses the payload capacity to carry computers and exteroceptive sensors for fully autonomous multi-modal operations. Third, we combine locomotion diversity and autonomy in M4 to perform novel maneuvers such as tumbling over large obstacles and traveling over steep ramps. This paper presents the mechanical design and the algorithms that enable M4 to perform these modes. These algorithms are explained in the Method Section and entail an optimization-based control (collocation method) and path planning algorithm (multi-modal probabilistic road map [MM-PRM] and A * algorithms). We report the experimental results that substantiate the claimed capabilities.RECORD AUDIO - When you tap the camera button, we use your microphone to when recording videos of MiP driving. The microphone is only activated when you press the camera button, we do not record without your permission. Dance -Upload a song to the app library, press play and watch your robot move to the beat (but please no One Direction) CONTROL VIBRATION - We use this for some of the game modes to vibrate your phone such as Battle Mode. You can toggle this setting on/off before starting the game. MiP™ Arcade comes fully loaded top-tier tech like Bluetooth and GestureSense™ technology and keeps you playing non-stop with new accessories! The chassis structures and shrouded propeller components in M4 were primarily made of carbon fiber and 3D-printed parts. The 3D-printed parts are fabricated using a fiber-inlay process based on Onyx thermoplastic materials and carbon fiber. These materials were considered due to their great strength-to-weight ratios. M4’s system architecture is outlined in Fig. 4c showing the controller system, power electronics, and communication protocol used in the robot. The robot utilizes two microcontrollers for low-level locomotion control; one is used for posture and wheel motion control, while the other is used to regulate thrusters. In addition to the low-level locomotion controllers, there is a high-level decision-making computer for autonomous multi-modal path planning. The details of M4’s dynamic modeling, low-level locomotion controller design, and high-level, multi-modal path planning can be seen in the Methods Section. Experimental results