Robohub Podcast – Marsupial Robots, with Chris Lee

Listen to another podcast from the team at Robohub. More podcasts from them can be found here.

Lilly interviews Chris Lee, a graduate student at Oregon State University. Lee explains his research on marsupial robots, or carrier-passenger pairs of heterogeneous robot systems.

A phrase coined in the late 1990s, “marsupial robots” are pairs of robots where a larger robot carries a smaller passenger robot.

The term ‘marsupial’ actually has its origins in biology, where it is used to describe animal species that carry around their young in a pouch, such as kangaroos.

The idea behind marsupial robots is that each of the two parts complements the other. The passenger robot, for instance, a UAV, might be better suited for sensing and exploration, while the carrier robot might have a much longer battery life.

They discuss the possible applications of marsupial robots including the DARPA Subterranean Competition, and some of the technical challenges including optimal deployment formulated as a stochastic assignment problem.

Chris Lee

Chris Lee is pursuing a Master of Science in Robotics at Oregon State University, having received a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Buffalo. His research is in robotic exploration, frontier extraction, and stochastic assignment.

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