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The Project
The aerospace robotics lab is a workspace that aims to develop new and unique designs for rovers built to explore extraterrestrial landscapes. Currently, we are aiming to design a quadruped-rover capable of morphing its appendages into different shapes, allowing for 6 or more different types of traversal modalities. In each modality, the rovers contact patch and bounding box change, allowing it to resize itself and its traversal modes to better overcome any particular obstacle it may encounter.
My Work
Currently, I am working on developing the universal hip joint for all 4 legs of our most recent rover project. The joint is comprised of a spherical parallel manipulator which we are working on optimizing based on the desired feedback and torque we expect in each particular range of motion of the joint. Based on this optimization, I am testing and changing the geometry of each linkage through CAD parameterized to the variables in the Jacobian matrix that defines the manipulability of each architecture setup. With this method, we can tune the performance of manipulator based on numerically driven data predicting the capabilities of each iteration.
I am also in charge of designing the mounting rig for our current testing rover leg. The mounting rig uses kinematic equations of the ground-contact point with respect to the mounting point, to fix the rover's theoretical contact patch in space while the leg performs stepping paths. This allows us to study the movement of the leg's chassis mounting point and study how the bounding box of the rover changes as the body moves with each step.
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