Part of my work at MIT in d’Arbeloff Laboratory, I developed a 3-DoF robotic arm using custom actuators with variable gear-ratios. The aim is to develop a lightweight & high-payload architecture for mobile and portable robots. A journal paper on this topic is available at this link: Leveraging Natural Load Dynamics with Variable Gear-ratio Actuators. The software used for controlling this arm is available here: github.com/alx87grd/DSDM_Robotics_ROS.
My work consisted in:
- Mechanical design of actuators, lightweight robot structure and mechanisms;
- Design and implementation of novel control and planning algorithms;
- Development of the control software using ROS, C++ and Python (5,000+ lines of code);
- Laboratory assembly, manufacturing and experiments.