Hope College Engineering Department Research Experiences for Undergraduates Summer 2009 Project Summary

This work describes the use of simulating walker robots to design choreographed gaits for tetrahedral (TET) walker robots. A TET robot is composed of nodes and struts arranged into tetrahedral cells. The extension and contraction of the struts allows the tetrahedral robot to walk. The cells can be stacked into different configurations to make more complex robots; the combinations are infinite. Our Hope Controls Team so far has built a working 4-TET robot and done extensive modeling and gait development with it. They have determined the 4-TETs tumbling gait is inefficient and causes too much wear on the robots parts. Because increasing the number of cells increases the constraints on the robot, the 12-TET configuration is over constrained. Our goal was to find a robot more complex than the 4-TET and less complex than the 12-TET configuration in order to maximize efficiency and minimize constraints. Using MATLAB’s SimMechanics package, we modeled the gaits of the 6- and 8-TET configurations. We developed these gaits by finding geometric relationships between the struts. Using simulations of these TET robots we can determine the best possible configuration of tetrahedrons and gaits, in terms of force used, extension ratios and wear on the machine. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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