Skip to content

Project SPLITTER

splitter

SPLITTER in Planetary Exploration

Project SPLITTER is our foundational work for our future upcoming agile modular robot.

We have developed:

  • A new cycloidal gear-based quasi direct drive actuator.
  • A multi-modal foot grasping end effector with a total of 8-axis force sensing.
  • An inertial morphing Model Predictive Controller for space exploration.

SPLITTER is designed to achieve enhanced multi-modal locomotion capabilities beyond our MOBIUS.

Cycloidal Gear Quasi Direct Drive (CQDD) Actuator

cqdd

  • cqdd

    CQDD Exploded View

  • splitter

    CQDD in Motion

Multi-Modal End Effector with 8-axis Force Sensing

magpie

  • In MOBIUS, the hands work as foot when doing quadruped locomotion

    • Flat foot is ideal for static case
    • Liner foot is ideal for dynamic locomotion
    • The limbed robot needs to grasp objects

    Need for multi-modal foot-gripper

magpie MAGPIE

  • hand

    MOBIUS example

  • MAGPIE Grasping

  • Magnetic Interference Detection

  • sensor

    3D Hall Effect Sensor Based Force Sensing Mechanism

  • sensor

    Total 8-axis contact and grasping force sensors

  • sensitivity

    Possible sensitivity and force ranges with different materials

  • graph

    Sensor Mechanism Design

    • Our computational design framework let us design force range and sensitivity of the 3D hall effect based force sensing
    • Changing the magnet sizing, positioning, and beam parameters let us design desired force sensing characteristic
    • Our framework generates ideal model

  • overall MAGPIE Website

    • Computational Framework Codes and APIs Doc
    • Consider magnetic interferences
    • Our stacked Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) based mean variance estimator
    • Ideal model with Gaussian radial basis functions (GRBF)

Inertial Morphing MPC and SPLITTER for space exploration

splitter

Publications