This dissertation presents the development of DASH+Wings and BOLT, two small hybrid legged and winged robots.DASH+Wings is a six-legged, two-winged robot capable of wing-assisted terrestrial running and controlled aerial descent. BOLT is a two-legged, four-winged robot capable of high-speed terrestrial running and sustained flight. While the dynamics of legged locomotion have been extensively studied, the interaction between legs and flapping wings during terrestrial locomotion is poorly understood. WingSLIP, an extension to the canonical SLIP model for understanding wing-assisted terrestrial locomotion, is introduced. Analysis of the leg/wing phasing and leg stiffnesses elucidates the interaction between the legs and wings. The model suggests the presence of passively stable gaits for high-speed wing-assisted terrestrial running. The dynamics of wing-assisted terrestrial locomotion for aquasi-static and dynamic gait are examined using BOLT with the addition of an on-board accelerometer and rate gyroscope.
We compare the delays experienced by packet flows when transmitted using ifferent scheduling algorithms across a crossbar switch. The two scheduling algorithms e consider are iterative SLIP and QCSMA.We first compare them under the assumptions that all packets have the same length, and then under the assumption that the half the packets have the maximum allowable length and half have the minimum allowable length. Our findings suggest that the variation in packet length has a non-negligible effect on throughput vs delay results. For long-lived TCP connections with varying packet lengths, QCSMA derived schedulers seem to do only marginally better than SLIP.