Pink Panther - Resarch Project (Work In Progress)

Date: January 2020 - Present

WHY

I initially built the Pink Panther to experience first hand the intricacies of building a robot and having it move as intended. Now, collaborating with the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, we are exploring in the self modeling and learning capabilities of the robot.

WHAT

The Pink Panther is a quadruped robot whose current ability is to reliably walk on flat surfaces at ~0.33 m/s. In collaboration with CML, we are applying a learning algorithm so that the robot learns to adapt its gait to adverse conditions (ie. one leg fully shut down).

HOW

I went from sketches and back of the envelope calculations to Solid Works CAD iterations; from simulations on PyBullet (a physics engine) to a fully built robot walking in the real world. The robot is controlled by a Raspberry-Pi using Python and has 12 DOF. Networking communication is used to run the reinforcement learning policy.

Mentions:

Columbia Engineering instagram post

Collaborators:

Robby Costales; Robert Kwiatkowski; Dr. Hod Lipson