Leg Shaping and Event-Driven Control of a Small-Scale, Low-DoF, Two-Mode Robot

Dingkun Guo, Larissa Wermers, and Kenn R. Oldham

IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, 2022

IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM), 2022

[Website] [Paper] [Presentation]

Citation

Please cite this work if it helps your research:

@ARTICLE{walk2roll,  
  author={Guo, Dingkun and Wermers, Larissa and Oldham, Kenn R.},
  journal={IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics}, 
  title={Leg Shaping and Event-Driven Control of a Small-Scale, Low-DoF, Two-Mode Robot}, 
  year={2022}, volume={27}, number={4}, pages={1910-1918},
  doi={10.1109/TMECH.2022.3173183}}

Overview

In this work, we design and prototype a two-DoF walking-rolling robot. This repository contains

1. Code for leg profile generation and analysis
2. CAD files of the prototype
3. Code of the event-driven controller

Prerequisites

This code is tested with MATLAB, Arduino, and Arduino UNO Wifi Rev 2.

Leg profile generation and analysis

In design foler:

1. The MATLAB file to randomly generate leg profiles and calculate J1 and J2 will be added by request. A .mat file that contains the raw data from the Monte Carlo simulations is provided here. You can load it first and run the remaining files.
2. Run a_CriteriaPlots.m, b_CleanTrends.m, c_ApproximateParetoCurve.m sequentially to generate figures in the paper.

CAD

CAD files used for 3D printing the robot are included in CAD folder.

Event-driven controller

An electrical diagram for the robot is shown below:

In controller folder, compile and upload roll.ino, walk.ino, or roll_and_walk.ino to Arduino board and the robot is alive!

Note: The definitions of front and rear legs are opposite to those in the paper. The state numbers are also different.