Robot Hexapod (RHex)

Lately we've been musing about what the right strategy will be for agricultural phenotyping solutions, and we're currently thinking about the advantages of large numbers of cheap, small, legged, autonomous robots that can crawl the fields and image plants. These are a few ideas that we want to come back to later if we ever get around to prototyping something.

Boston Dynamics built a rugged version of the robot hexapod archetype (RHex).

The Koditschek lab works extensively on the RHex (I believe RHex was born of a DARPA project that Koditschek was on):
Koditschek lab site link

And a couple of relevant manuscripts from Koditschek:
Saranh, Buehler, Koditschek, (2001) RHex: A simple and highly mobile hexapod robot
Weingarten, Buehler, Groff, Koditschek (2003) Gait generation and optimization for legged robots
Haynes, Pusey, Knopf, Johnson, Koditschek (2012) Laboratory on legs: an architecture for adjustable morphology with legged robots

This is a student project for building an RHex that uses a Kinect for navigation (RHex Box); it has a bit of content for a DIY RHex:
Project website link