Inspired by Boston Dynamics' Spot Mini, MIT's Mini Cheetah, and the exceptional work by my good friend Adham Elarabawy on OpenQuadruped
https://www.adham-e.dev/
https://github.com/adham-elarabawy/open-quadruped
Mechanical: I'll be starting out with a lightweight but robust 3D Printed frame + some fairly powerful hobby servos with a BOM cost of <$800. Eventually, I hope to scale it up and move to hobby brushless DC motors. Or in the far future, custom motor technology.
Control: I'm using a Raspberry Pi for pose computation and a Teensy 4.0 MCU to handle peripheral IO but mainly PWM to the servo motors. In the far future I might scale to a Nvidia Jetson Nano SOM for more complex motion/path planning projects, which would require a much better sensor suite.
Demos
- Hardware // Find out how to SSH a headless RPi4 over ethernet and connect to Wifi
- Hardware // Rectify RPi undervolting issue
- Hardware & Software // Untethered operation with joystick pose control
- Software // Rewrite current python visualization + controller code in C++
- Software // Basic gait generation & walking
- Hardware // Research current sense circuit for contact detection
- Software // Change power-on servo initialization behavior
- Software // Physics Simulation - ROS & Gazebo
- Software // Gait generation & walking