This was a small-scale project I worked on with 2 MS students in the Biorobotics Lab

The goal was to make a modular robot that could climb poles. By interlocking with other robots, they could perform more complicated maneuvers to navigate around various poles and pipes.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/uSU-kyc9glg

I worked extensively on the mechanical design, especially the “Dock-and-Lock” mechanism that enabled two polebots to interlock and perform the movements in the video above. The major constraint was to allow the two modules to interlock without adding any additional actuators. In this case, we only had vertical and rotational motion available, so I designed a rotational keyway that allowed the two bots to interface.

Pole Bot “Dock-and-Lock”

I also did work on code — in particular making teleoperated controls for the robot in MATLAB. Limitations on the interface to the actuators prevented us from being able to write more complex operations for the robots.

Repos for the controller code can be found here

And some primitive work into computer vision for identifying poles can be found here