Dog Robot

What

I built this robot for my Bio-inspired robotics class. This project is a good showcase of many of the skills that are useful in walking robotics such as kinematics and inverse kinematics, gait planning, mechanical design, and electrical design. The goal for this project was to create a robot modeled after a biological source and have it walk like that source in a straight line for 30 body lengths.

How

I choose to make the legs a linkage-driven design because I thought it would be an original idea and require each leg to have to lift less distal mass. This required a bit more mechanical design, but I think it was worth it. Each joint uses bearings which I implemented with the bearing design strategies taught to me in my machine design class. The electronics are mounted on a custom perf board that I hand soldered, and the code is running on an Arduino Nano. The code features a custom gait using position control and a full inverse kinematic model running dynamically.