Tag Archives: simulation

Operating on sloped surfaces

robots, , , ,

Not too long ago, I ran some outdoor experiments, and while piloting the quad A1 around, realized that it wasn’t going to get very far if it was restricted to just flat ground.

Since the control algorithms are completely ignorant of slopes, the center of gravity of the machine can easily get too close to the support polygon when resting, and similarly fails to stay balanced over the support line during the trot gait.

To get started tackling this, I stuck a configurable ramp in the simulator:

And yes, it fails just as much on the ramp as it did in real life.

Resurrected quadruped simulator

robots, , , , , ,

Thankfully, I’m now at the point where I’m fixing actual dynamics problems on the robot.  Doubly thankfully I have a robot which is pretty robust and keeps working!  That said, it is still, shall we say, “non-ideal”, to be testing code for the first time ever on a real robot.

Back with my HerkuleX based Super Mega MicroBot, I had a working DART based simulation which was decently accurate.  However, the actuators for that machine were so limited that it didn’t really make sense to do any work in simulation.  The only way to be effective with that machine was to tweak and tweak on the real platform and rely on exactly the right amount of bouncing and wiggling that would get it moving smoothly.

Now that I can accurately control force at 400Hz and beyond, that isn’t a problem anymore, so I’m working to resurrect the bitrotted simulator.  In the end though, it turned out to be a complete re-write as basically nothing of the original made sense to use.

Here’s a video of the very first time it moved around in sim (which means there are still many problems left!)