Principles Of Engineering
Principles of Engineering (POE) ends with a 6 week, open ended final project. For my project, I worked on a team of 5 to design, build, and program a 6 legged robot. Overall, our project ws a success. We have a walking hexapod with some nice features which will allow us to continue working with this platform in the future.
Initially, we had a small design flaw, which caused the legs to break under the weight of the body, but we were able to fix that with a small change to achieve the current working frame. At first we used an arduino alone to make the robot walk forward, but in order to expand the behaviors to include translational movement and turning, we needed more computing power. For this, we added a rasperry pi, which communicates via serial communication with the arduino to control the robot. In addition to allowing us to do more math on board, this addition allowed us to implement ROS on our robot, which means we could add things like the simulator shown below so we can test new behaviors without worrying about breaking the hexapod. To see more details about our project, visit our project website.
In this project, I have combined my experience with laser cutting and 3D printing with things I learned in my hobbies working on remote controlled cars and multirotors. By combining different experiences and production methods, we were able to design a very light, sturdy hexapod, which will translate to longer battery life and more precise control over the hexapod's movements. To expand the features of the hexapod, we also applied some of the things I have been learning in Computational Robotics and Olin Robotic Sailing to connect a Raspberry Pi to the arduino which controls the servos to give us more computational power for calculating more complex leg motions.