PROJECT VISION & GOALS

VISION

The project is to build a walking robot that actually does work. As such, the size and body of the robot must be practical and the actuator/servo must be industrial quality. Quadruped (6 legged) is preferred as it provides a good balance and stability for walking, climbing, and the extra arm/legs can benefits from the extra sensors/tools. 3DOF (3 joints per leg) was preferred for simpler programming and less number of actuators to go wrong (the concept of a minimum viable product design). Over the years, the robot will be used as a main prototyping platform adding addition capabilities such as vision, sensing, speech etc. One important thing to note about this project is that the end-state vision for the robot is not an autonomous robot controlled by the onboarded computer. Rather, my turbo computer based in my lab will be controlling the robot as if the pilot is flying the FPV drone remotely. In addition to the benefit of much more computing and processing power with this approach, I also have the ability to scale up by adding additional identical and/or different robots. The network of robots can work together and share its data leveraging the central turbo computer. Perhaps some people may see this as a Skynet scenario, but I currently see this approach as a viable way of effectively controlling the large number of robots/cars/phones/IoT.

GOALS - 2020

• Research and acquire a base robot framework - robot body, servo, controller, sensors

• Research and test several gait development platforms - RSO, Cynthiam, ArbotiX/Arduino

• Implement basic capabilities - walking, running, climb stairs, vision - object detection, speech recognition

• Search and destroy mission - find and neutralize enemy killer drones