Hexa Robot

Summary: In the work presented in this paper, a small-scale HEXA robot was successfully designed and constructed. The inverse kinematics were derived and used to successfully control the robot’s position. A thin plate spline algorithm was used to track the deformation of a non-linearly deforming surface,and a simple p-controller was used to keep the robot’s position along the deforming trajectory. Future work could include implementing a more sophisticated controller, as well as including depth and rotation in the tracking algorithm.

Contributions: For this system, I designed many of the components using SolidWorks and used rapid prototyping techniques such as laser cutting and 3D printing to make them. The joints are unique as they use magnets to connect, which gives the robot the necessary amount of range of motion for the application. I assisted, along with my project members, in programming the robots control scheme to track and print on a deformable object using Robot Operating System (ROS).

Year: 2018

Specifics:

Report: Hexa_Robot.pdf

Video: