State estimation and dynamic feedback behaviors for a legged robot:
The goal of this project is to design and build a sensor-rich RHex capable of supporting the development of feedback-based dynamic behaviors. It also serves the dual purpose of creating the necessary infrastructure in Bilkent and METU to support research on autonomous legged robots.
Our first iteration design improvements on RHex will include the following:
Accurate torque control on each hip
A I2C based in-robot communication architecture for interfacing with sensor and actuator modules distributed around the robot
A larger suite of sensors including well-tuned inertial sensors, auditory sensors for environmental perception, laser range sensors and a stereo camera
Improved computational infrastructure with local control tasks delegated to local microcontrollers and faster central CPU for higher level tasks.