Senior Capstone: Mechatronic Design Dance Robot Project

For my Senior Design Project, I worked with a team of three to create a “walking wheelchair,” for use in the AXIS Dance Company’s Kinematic/Kinesthetic performance, which sought to highlight the unique movement capabilities of differently-abled performers.
I served as the electronics and programming lead for this project. I designed and executed the design and layout of our power electronics and controls electronics, designed the software architecture to control the system, and programmed the locomotion algorithm to translate user input commands into motor commands for the hexapod robot to execute.

For this project I used ROS for the first time to drive the translation from user input to actuation commands. User commands were inputted by gamepad, which was then received by a Raspberry Pi running ROS Noetic, which would translate the desired motion into a sequence of actuation commands. These commands would then be transmitted by serial to 3 Arduino microcontrollers, each responsible for providing the input commands to the motor controllers.

The motors were powered by 2, 12V batteries wired in series to create a 24V power supply. This was necessary as this was the input voltage to the stepper motors. This was stepped down to 12V to power the linear actuators, and all computer elements were powered through an external 5V USB power bank.

At its conclusion, our robot was capable of maneuvering under no load, though struggled with a human passenger. Due to current limits on our power supply, we ended up adopting a slow, ponderous gait, which unintentionally had the benefit of appearing otherworldly, earning major props with the sponsor.

Project Team
Matthew Saenz - Electrical and Software Design
Atharva Pulujkar - Mechanical Design
Jiamang Huang - Mechanical Structure Design, Project Management