Schedule
Week 1
Lecture on BLDC robot actuators and low-level control of robot joints.
../course-material/lab-1 Introduction to Teensy microcontroller. Mechatronics assembly. Experimenting with PID to move BLDC actuators to desired angles. Moving three actuators simultaneously.
Lab 2 - Bad Robot Surgeon Build 3-DOF leader-follower robot arms akin to a surgical robotic system.
Week 2
Lecture on forward kinematics of open-chain robots and applications.
Lab 3 - Safety Dance (Fall 2021) Program the robot to tell you the cartesian coordinates of the leg for any given position. Staying within a cartesian-space safety box with haptic feedback.
Week 3
Lecture on inverse kinematics of open-chain robots and applications
Lab 4 - Drawbot Program legs to move to desired locations using inverse kinematics. Finally, drawing images with a robot arm! Task-space impedance control if time allows.
Week 4
Lecture on quadruped gaits: e.g. theory behind gallop, walk, trot, etc and associated stability.
Lab 5 - Virtual Twin Program the robot to trot using open-loop task-space trajectories. Simulating the robot in PyBullet to design and test code before deploying in the real world.
Week 5
Lab 6 - Pupper Assembly Students build full Pupper robot.
Week 6
Survey of topics to explore in the final project including reinforcement learning, computer vision, hardware redesign, human interaction.
Google Brain guest lecture.
Students brainstorm project ideas, do background research, and determine final project.
Week 7
Mini-lectures on any additional material students might find useful for their project.
Open lab time to work on final projects
Week 8
Students present project prototype
Week 9
Open lab time
Week 10
Students finish final project and showcase to faculty and Google Brain.
Week 11 (finals week)
Students upload code, documentation, and media so that future students / hobbyists can recreate their work.
Play with robots!