Design and control of a 3-DOF planar hopping robot, used for NASA-sponsored locomotion research at Northwestern University's NxR lab, advised by Dr. Paul Umbanhowar and Dr. Kevin Lynch.
Soft ground is a new frontier in robotic locomotion. It underles many uses for robots, such as extraterrestrial exploration, disaster response, search and rescue, military ground support, and earth science. Given the multitude of legged animals that traverse dirt, sand, and snow with relative ease, legged robots are a promising alternative to wheeled or treaded robots, which often get stuck in or skid on these types of yielding terrain.
Hopp3r is a robotization of the spring-loaded inverted pendulum (SLIP) legged locomotion template, but with an additional degree of freedom to enable it to apply arbitrary planar wrenches. This way, it's capable of hopping as well as balancing, which enables us to learn not just how to achieve legged gaits on yielding terrain but also how to start and stop these gaits.
Hopp3r is a quasi-direct-drive robot, so the actuators can be backdriven easily. This facilitates high-bandwidth virtual impedance motion control.
- Alex Friedman
- Zen Iwankiw
- Dan Lynch
- Greg Niederschulte
- Andrew SaLoutos
- Suhail Pallath Sulaiman
- Tom Xiao