Last time I updated my inverse kinematics solution to also include dynamics, velocities and forces.  Now I’m in the process of integrating this onto the robot.

The old SMMB / HerkuleX control software commanded the servo positions in an open loop, which did not take into account the actual position of the joints in any way.  What I’ve done now is implemented a control flow where at each cycle the state of all 12 servos is sampled, then the control laws are applied based on that state, then the resulting commands are sent out.

A while ago I derived some closed form solutions for the inverse force dynamics for a 2 dimensional mammal geometry leg.  Now that I want to execute more dynamic gaits, I need to be able to control the velocity and force of the 3 dimensional leg in real time.  That means I need to be able to go forward and back between the two representations.  The first being joint angles, joint velocities, and joint torques – the second being 3D position, velocity, and force.

My outdoor filming for the project update video was cut short when the machine cut power to the motors, fell down, and one of the legs snapped off.  Fortunately, I already had plenty of footage when that happened, so it didn’t really impact the video.

First, this demonstrates the not too surprising fact that this particular part of the leg design could use to be improved.  Second, and the topic of this post, is improving what the machine does when the inevitable failure does occur.

Back when I was getting Super Mega Microbot “Junior” ready for Maker Fair Bay Area 2019, I made it minimally self sufficient through a quick hack of adding some PVC pipe that allowed it to manipulate its feet into a known good position while the robot was safely up in the air.

This worked, but had a number of obvious disadvantages.  For one, it looked ugly!  Second, the machine couldn’t squat down very far before getting stranded on the “resting legs”.  I’ve finally gotten around to doing at least a first attempt at something better!

To demonstrate the dynamic capability of the full rotation quadruped, I figured I would start by doing some full machine jump tests to a relatively low height, just to show that it was capable.

Thus, I rigged up an open loop script which squatted a small fraction of the available distance, and then powered up at a relatively small fraction of the available maximum speed.  I don’t have the telemetry yet to extrapolate how high this will be able to go at maximum, but I think it should be a fair amount higher.  For now, I want to do some more instrumentation and walking testing (and have more spares) before I manage to break things by jumping really high.

Now that I could stand up and sit down, I needed to be able to walk reliably for the length of a match.  This wasn’t going to be easy because the direct drive motors were always a bit marginal in their power output to support the full robot, so I had my work cut out for me.

The short story is, I tried many things, spent about a day examining high speed video of walking, and made some improvements: