You Can Design Your Own Sophisticated Walking Robot Thanks to This Student Project
OpenLeg is intended to make development of legged robots and associated algorithms accessible to hobbyists and researchers on a budget.
If you’ve ever seen a demonstration video from Boston Dynamics, you know how startlingly-capable robots can be today. Their infamous Big Dog robot, for example, amazed the world with its eerie ability to traverse complex terrain and react to impacts. While the hardware needed to build a robot like Big Dog is certainly expensive, its design and the algorithms used to control that hardware are arguably more valuable. That’s why University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign student Joey Byrnes, along with partners Kanyon Edvall and Ahsan Qureshi, have designed an open source robot leg similar to those used on Boston Dynamics’ quadruped robots.
This design, appropriately named OpenLeg, started as a senior design project for the students. Instead of focusing on the entire robot, they instead focused their efforts on the trickiest part of a robot like this: the legs. Each leg has three degrees-of-freedom, and two actuated joints. OpenLeg is purposefully designed to be versatile, so four identical legs can be used for a robot. In theory, you could just build a torso to work with these legs and you’d have a complete robot.
They have made all of their design files open source, have ensured that OpenLeg can be built using just 3D-printed parts and off-the-shelf components, and have even put together a detailed assembly guide. In addition the mechanical parts, the electronic control components are also open source. That ethos also carries of over to the software, including the algorithms that make a variety of common movements possible. They hope that OpenLeg will lower the barrier of entry that has stopped hobbyists and researchers from building their own sophisticated quadruped robots, and ultimately fuel new open source development.