What was the challenge this time?

My initial rough sketch on body configuration and motor setup

Well… We worked in groups to achieve the ultimate project of this class: creating a walking and dancing dog that also has some type of vision. With about a 3 week timeline, we quickly started in our teams.

What Did our team look like?

The main team was composed of 6 people and we were broken down in sub-teams:

Eyes

• Emmy Daro was leading our vision with our camera and object detection

Leg team

• Suely Acosta and Adrien Amblard were tackling the walking and path planning of our dog

Brain

• Aayushma Gautam was focusing on communication and power for our dog

Body (my team)

• Sloan Woodberry and I partnered up in the fabrication process of the dog
• Codes we used

What were the first steps?

During our initial design and talk, especially with the leg sub-team we wanted to try something risky.

On top of the knee and shoulder motor joints, we wanted to add a third motor to the legs to add abduction and adduction.

Initially we wanted to add that extra range of motion to help us turn and help our robot dance better.

• Next step was figuring out the specs of our motors

For our build, we wanted a strong robot dog built with metal.

Despite the past cautionary tales of metal constructions being too heavy, we wanted to utilize the advantages of metal without the weight penalty.

• Enter… metal skeleton

Here is an older mockup of a body idea with that metal skeleton.

Now we need to design the joints

Shoulder to Body Joint

Initial shoulder to body mount solid acrylic

Updated and more Skeletonize mount

We designed on Onshape mounts for the motors, as each mount had a unique challenge.

Sloan deigned the shoulder to body mount, we needed to push the legs away from the body to help uses our additional range of motion.

One thing the shoulder did teach us is that acrylic is heavy… so we had to skeletonize our designs.