The famous robot dog from Boston Dynamics has become a phenomenon since it began to appear in the media. It's called Spot, and it surprises with its dynamism. Obviously, it is a closed design of the North American company and it is not exactly cheap. Instead, now an alternative arises, it is the Open Dynamic Robot Initiative project.
Basically it is an initiative to create an architecture of open source modular robot and that it can be used both to control it and perform a multitude of movements or to robotics research. A quadruped similar to Boston Dynamics that you can build yourself ...
What is the Open Dynamic Robot Initiative?
Open Dynamic Robot Initiative is a project that seeks to bring together community effort to build a low-cost, modular quadruped robot called Solo. In addition, it has a low complexity, using brushless motors like those used for many other projects, and with fairly common control systems. Also, the structure of this robot can be printed on a printer 3D, for the most part.
The initiative has some partners and collaborations Important such as Motion Generation and Control Group, Dynamic Locomotion Group, Robotics Central Scientific Facility of the Max Planck Institute, Machine In Motion Laboratory, and Gepetto Team of LAAS / CNRS.
Official site of the initiative on GitHub
Document with the description of the actuator module and design
TriFinger Platform Document and Real-Time Learning Experiments
Build your own robot
All the hardware can be obtained and / or printed in 3D easily thanks to the documentation and designs provided by the Open Dynamic Robot Initiative, in addition, the software for the control of this project that gives it life, is Open source, free, and under BSD license. This ensures that everyone can access this robot for their research labs, without restrictions. In addition, everyone is welcome to continue with the development and improvements of the project.
The project gives you everything you need:
- The sources for creating the mechanics and electronics of the hardware for the robot, as well as the actuator module, sensors, and legs and locomotion of only.
- Open Dynamic software is also available here, with various libraries available for development. This software consists of:
- API for communication real-time control circuitry for the robot motors.
- MotorWare extensions with modules to expand the Texas Instruments library, and patches with some necessary modifications.
- Configuration files global for MotorWare.