Overview
One of my motivations for taking HTMAA was the opportunity to fabricate some of my ideas. My research focus is in urban mobility and I am thinking a lot about autonomous delivery. I think it would be pretty cool to design and develop an urban robotics animal for my final project.
Concept from Week 1
My first idea for the final project was a low profile platform that is fully drive by wire and has on board sensing for autonomy. The vehicle should fit uses for personal mobility, cargo, and various utilities needed in city movement. It should have universal mounting rails on the deck of the vehicle. Maybe it could be transformable between modes? Like the citycar, the city mobility unit should have hub motors to avoid any mechanical linkages that need to transfer power to the wheels. While I think this is cool I think that I can be more creative
More ideation
I would like to push my ideas a bit further than just a moving little platform. Here are some potential candidates:
- MicroBlimp - A soft drone that can move through a city and interact with people (see early prototype)
- Quadruped - A little robot...with Capstan drive maybe using Dyneema or something like that? Lower gear intertia could result in better IMF?
- Panda Robot - My research work is making a little panda inspired robot for delivery. I could work on one of the prototypes in HTMAA. I could make a scale prototype.
- Grasping Mechanisim for Delivery Robot
- HMI for Delivery Robot
- Design a Torque Dense Actuator and controller
The Last meter and Legged Robots
Automated delivery in cities is super difficult since you need to move from the street to the front door.
Moving from the street to the final destination is even less structured than driving in the street. This is why it is such a large bottleneck.
If multifunctional autonomous micromobility was paired with last-meter robots, they could deliver packages during the night or when ridership is low and so you could have smaller fleets and less embodied carbon.
As soon as you leave the street you find that a lot of infrastructure was designed for people and so having legs can be an advantage.
Some wacky ideas on what I could build...
What if we put RFIDs in the straps of a package to let the robot know where it should grab and where the package needs to go?
I made a little joint angle diagram of the doggo robot I want to build for moving around a city.
System Architecture Diagram
1 + 8DoF quadruped walking robot.
Schedule
Stay tuned for more updates!!
