Bipedal Robot MIT CSAIL
During Junior/Senior year of MIT, I worked on hardware for a bipedal robot. My lab partner and I used 3D printing and waterjet cutting(got to operate it ourselves) to create a hardware prototype that unfortunately never walked.
My labmate and I are currently revamping this project to get the boy walking!
Picture from end of Junior year at MIT
I've been getting interested in computational geomery, so I thought it woud be interesting to do the designing using tools that I create. Basically what I'm working on is a library that takes in a bunch of primitives(cylinders, boxes, spheres etc) that can be modelled mathematically and applying boolean operations between them to make more complex geometries. Instead of drawing and extruding its, just defining origins and radii etc(maybe a bit tedious). After defining the brackets and high detail thigs with this, I developed 3D Topology Optimization in python mostly from scratch. Kinda crazy how solving FEA is just solving Ax = b (matrices are wizardry).
Left: defined geometries and bounding boxes of topology. Right: the topology optimized part incorporated into the leg assembly(still very WIP)
The intent here is to define boundaries and generatively design the parts in between, ideally using a urdf file and doing boolean operations to cut away sections from min to max joint angles to ensure clearance
I've been running some experiments/learning about how to use RL with mujoco.
Reward was to maximize z height here. WHEEEE
