Category: General

Ascento just got a new website with a brand new design! Go check it out at www.ascento.ch and get to know Ascento in more detail. DonÔÇÖt miss any updates with the latest ÔÇÿNewsÔÇÖ section and feel free to contact us.

In September, we were invited to the 5th Digital Festival Z├╝rich to hold a lab session and two talks at HackZurich 2020. Thank you everyone for coming to our presentations and for visiting our lab. We had a lot of fun presenting and we loved the cool designs of the mini-Ascentos! If you missed it,…

Today, October 13, is the International Day For Failure. To celebrate this date, enjoy our Ascento robot fail compilation! With every failure we experience, we learn more and we can improve our robot for its next iteration, which will come soon… Stay tuned for more!

We are absolutely amazed by the sudden success of our video ÔÇ£This is Ascento 2ÔÇØ on YouTube. It took 5 months to reach the first 100ÔÇÖ000 views and suddenly 3 days later it reached 200ÔÇÖ000 and another 3 days later 300ÔÇÖ000 views! Thank you all very much for your interest, your feedback and your support…

Fancy geometry right? You have probably already noticed that the legs of Ascento have an organic and exotic looking design, especially in our previous prototype. This is not because our engineers decided to go full creative and free shape the parts, this is the result of topology optimization. By specifying where our loads and supports…

Ascento has two legs which can be controlled independently by two motors installed in the hips. The geometry of its legs is a 4-bar linkage, optimized such that it moves in a straight line using only one motor. This enables Ascento not only to lean into curves and change its center of gravity, but also…

The same way humans have eyes 👀, Ascento has on-board cameras 📷 (marked in red) to perceive its environment. Two global shutter cameras are used for localisation. A depth sensor is used to create a 3D reconstruction of our environment and parametrise objects. For example, when the robot is standing in front of a step…

MathWorks recently shared an article about the Ascento robot and the team behind it, recalling the exhausting work needed to go from an idea to a fully working system. Have a look at it here https://ch.mathworks.com/company/mathworks-stories/eth-zurich-students-design-and-build-jumping-robot.html Instead of trying out the newly developed control algorithms directly on the real system, we tested everything in a…