Modeling and gait design of a 6-tetrahedron walker robot

Abstract

This work describes the use of simulating walker robots to design choreographed gaits for a tetrahedral (TET) walker robot. A TET robot is composed of nodes and struts arranged into tetrahedral cells. The extension and contraction of the struts allows the tetrahedral robot to walk. The Hope College Controls Team so far has built a working 4-TET robot and has done extensive modeling and gait development. It has been determined that the 4-TETs gaits are inefficient and causes too much wear on the robot parts. Our goal was to find a robot more complex than the 4-TET but minimizing constraints. Using MATLAB's SimMechanics package, we modeled the gaits of the 6 TET configurations. We developed these gaits by finding geometric relationships between the struts. Using simulations of these TET robots we can determine the best possible configuration of tetrahedrons and gaits, in terms of force used, extension ratios and wear on the machine.