LEMUR: Legged excursion mechanical utility rover

Although future orbital facilities will have immense scale, details will re quire intricate operations in restrictive, confined quarters. LEMUR is a sm all, agile and capable six-legged walking robot that has been built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to perform dexterous small-scale assembly, inspec tion and maintenance. It is intended to expand the operational envelope of robots in its size class (sub-5 kg) through the flexible use of its limbs a nd effectors, as well as through the modular changeout of those effectors. In short, LEMUR is intended as a robotic instantiation of a six-limbed prim ate with Swiss Army knife tendencies. LEMUR's layout consists of six independently operated limbs arranged in two rows of three. The front two limbs have four active degrees of freedom whi le the rear four limbs have three each. Each limb is reconfigurable to allo w the integration of a variety of mechanical tools.