Drive-o-copter Wheel Mounts and Suspension
Skills: This project made use of waterjetting, solidworks, and milling
Timeline: Winter 2020
ME 75 is an introductory project-based systems engineering course, focused this year on the DARPA Sub-T challenge. I worked on the drive-o-copter team to modify the front suspension for a flying and driving robot intended to navigate autonomously and “hop” over obstacles. The prior year’s model was 3D printed in several pieces, and I simplified the manufacturing process by reducing one 3D-printed part to three waterjet and drilled parts that could be easily modified to test a variety of wheels for the terrain.
Another piece of the project was working with the robotics operating system (ROS) to control the robotics and porting the model into the Gazebo simulator to test the local mapping methods. I wrote the joystick node for control of the AX-12A dynamixels in ROS.