RHex
RHex was a project that I worked on as an undergraduate visiting resaercher at the university of
central Lanchasire (UCLan). The visit was a grant by Erasmus+. UCLan and Erasmus representitives
test-ed and interviewed the top students of Ainshams University, me and another colleauge were
selected for the first time from our university. The visit was 92 days in Summer
2019.
The task was to build an off-road mobile platform. We were then asked to build the simple
hexabot RHex robot. So, I was chosen to Lead a team of three undergraduate researchers (me and
two others). My tasks were to manage and balance the work between team members, and I was
responsible for the software, simulation, and control part.
What did I do in the project?
- Proposed a new design for the complinet leg of the robot. RHex original design uses a C shaped leg and depends on the springiness of the structure and the material properties. I desigend a rigid three-segment leg with an RC car or bike suspension spring damper as the source of compliance in the system. This should make the whole manufacturing process easier and eliminate an annoying point of failure (failure of the compliant component of the leg). Moreover, the damper stifness is variable, which gives the system more freedom to work on many terrains.
- Led a team consisting of three researchers to design, simulate, and build the robot.
- Designed the joints trajectories so that at least three legs should be incontact with the ground at any given time.
- Designed the leg joints velocity profiles based on the robot's locomotion and gait analysis.
- Wrote the embedded code that controlled each joint to follow its trajectory.
- Build the robot in vrep simulation, and made a simple demo logic with an ultrasonic sensor to turn the robot when it senses a wall.
- Implemented all this in a real simple and low-cost platform.
