Bipedal Walking Robot
A bipedal walking robot built from scratch with my husband — no propellers, just legs, designed to go hiking
After developing Leonardo in 2021, I started building a new bipedal walking robot together with my husband, Patrick. It was during the COVID-19 pandemic, and since we were spending most of our time at home, we finally had the opportunity to work on a project just for ourselves.
We both love robotics, so designing and building the robot was a lot of fun. Our goal was simple: create a capable biped that we could eventually take hiking and explore the outdoors with.
At the time, there were only a handful of bipedal walking robots being developed around the world. Since then, the field has exploded. Today, we’re seeing an incredible wave of new humanoid and bipedal robots, making it one of the fastest-growing areas in robotics.
Compared to Leonardo, this robot does not use propellers. Instead it uses motors to drive the legs. We found some very nice Open-source motors and controllers from MJBots. We didn’t want to use propellers because they are very energy inefficient.
The robot has the following components:
- a Rasperry pi for controlling the motors’s drivers and the IMU.
- an Intel NUC for running the high level software
- 3 cameras to see its environment
- 3 motors to drive the legs (initially there were 4, but I removed one of them, the hip one because it made the structure have too much flex)
- Feet sensors to detect the ground (that was very challenging to get working because of the noise)
The controller is based on:
- model-based controller: capture point controller + inverse dynamics and inverse kinematics
- reinforcement learning (PPO). This one is still under development.
The paper is still working in progress.