Air-Released Soft Robot for Explosive Ordnance Disposal

The goal of this project was to create an untethered soft robot that could be deployed from an aerial drone near a landmine. The robot would then move atop the landmine and detonate it. This project involved two primary sections: the soft-hybrid robot, and the deployment mechanism. The robot was made of an electro-pneumatic system housed in and around a 3D printed body. This body had two “wheels” on either side of it. The wheels are thermoplastic urethane origami skeletons in a plastic-lined fabric bag. When the sealed bags had vacuum pulled inside them the origami forced the “wheels” to shrink and rotate. This allowed the robot to scoot forward. The second part was the deployment mechanism. This mechanism used a 3D printed rack-and-pinion to release the robot held in it. The motor control was tied into a commercial drone using signals and switches it already had on the controller.

3D Printed Pneumatic Network Robot

This robot is modeled after the Multigait Soft Robot by Shepard et al. I designed it with the intent to 3D print the robot in a single print on a Prusa Mini, which it achieved. One of the key considerations in its design was minimizing overhang printing. The other key consideration was the routing of internal tubes to allow all of the robot to be controlled from one end.

Constraint-Based God-Object Haptic Display on Random 2D Non-Convex Objects

Using Pycharm and Matplotlib (a Python library), I created a haptic display that calculated where a contact should be rendered on random non-convex 2D objects. This used the constraint-based god-object approach to haptic rendering. I programmed the haptic rendering and random-object creation from scratch. As can be seen in the lower two images the blue crosshair stays attached to the lowest potential energy location on the surface of the object that is possible given the previous position of itself. Therefore, the blue crosshair doesn’t jump to the nearest location to the black crosshair, which would require phasing through the object.

Pneumatic Network Design for 3D Printing

As part of the PneuNet Robot design, I developed a pneumatic network design for 3D printing. The first image is of a typical pneumatic network that is traditionally cast out of silicone. The silicone casting process is long and requires many manual steps for this sort of actuator. Therefore I developed a model for 3D printed pneunets. These are airtight, have uniform curvature, and require no post processing.

A Minimalist Approach to Segregation in Robot Swarms

I explored the idea of robot swarm segregation using a minimalist, if-then-else, approach. In this exploration I analyzed the effects of the number of robots, number of robot groups, and the rate at which robots could switch from group to group. This was implemented using Buzz in the ARGoS simulator with marXbot robots. This resulted in a few discoveries: our approach scales very well (with diminishing cost as the number of robots or groups increases), and given certain wheel speeds and changing behavior the robots can segregate themselves into a set number of classes. Our approach scales up well because the only computation the robot has to do is to view a robot in front of itself and if they are the same class turn right, otherwise turn left. Combine this with the robots changing their own class towards or away from the class of the viewed robot, and you get segregation behavior.

2D Simulated Automatic Rocket Landing

The purpose of this project was to use simulated rockets’ drag fins and thrusters to steer it into a soft vertical landing. Given the rocket’s position and velocity I used a PID controller and some designated actions to get the rocket to have a soft touchdown at the origin. This was done entirely within MATLAB.

Mechatronic IR Detector and Launcher

Above is the CAD model and the circuit diagram for a mechatronic system I developed. The goal of the system was to detect a specific frequency of IR light, and then fire the launcher. The launcher was spring powered, and was actuated by a motor. This motor was connected to the Vout of the circuit. The circuit detects IR using the photodetector diode on the far left. The signal is passed through a bandpass filter, into a peak detector, then a comparator such that it produces a signal of 5V when then specific IR frequency is detected. 

Four-Bar Gripper and Lifter

For one project, the robot had to lift a metal plate up to a set height and angle, so I analyzed the motion and designed a four-bar-linkage to achieve that. I also took into consideration the forces on the robot and selected an appropriate motor for the lifting. The final linkage was assembled of 3D printed and laser cut parts.