In this project I work on designing a modular six foot tall hexapod robot with the Office of Naval Research for search and rescue. As the student leading the project, I am directing a team of 20 undergraduate students, graduate students, and lab staff. Our focus is on novel actuation methods to optimize for torque-density and controller architecture for leg and body-level dynamics. Much of the details are not public right now, but stay tuned for my Master’s Thesis document for more info!
As part of this project I have developed a Matlab Toolbox App that calculates the actuator torques and speeds required to move a simplified hexapod model. This tools is useful for actuator selection when building large walking robots and can be downloaded from here.