Robo-roo was a one-legged robot created for Bio-Inspired Robotics (2.740). Robo-roo was built to investigate which method of jumping is most energy-efficient: short, fast hops (high frequency) or long, slow hops (low frequency).
My primary responsibilities in developing this robot were:
Design a stable control scheme
Model the robot's dynamic behavior (using Lagrangian mechanics)
Simulate the robot's motion using MATLAB
Implement the control scheme to MBED hardware
Assemble motor electronics
Collect and analyze experimental data
We conducted experiments with the robot in which the robot's speed was fixed (using a treadmill) but the frequency of jumping was varied. We then examined the "cost of transport" (a measure of energy consumption for locomotion) for the different cases. We concluded based on experimental results that higher frequency jumping is more efficient than lower frequency jumping.
Videos of the treadmill experiments for the high frequency (left) and low frequency (right) case are shown below.