RoboMaster Wheel-Legged Balancing Robot
Problem statement
The RoboMaster competition is an international event hosted by the DJI tech company, where universities gather to compete against one another in a PVP robotics tournament. Each university is required to develop three robots, each following different standards — infantry, sentry, and balance [1]. As an ambitious young club of six active members with only six months of experience, UW Madison’s RoboMaster team is striving to catch up with opponent universities by attempting to construct a balance robot to complement their existing infantry and sentry bots. Enlisting the help of a senior design team to develop a chassis and dynamic model for this project was a must, due to the extensive experience in complex mechanical design required. In the past, teams have favored wheel-legged balancing robots due to their combination of legged and segway robot characteristics, which offer natural advantages in both speed and navigation over obstacles [2]. Besides helping the client team gain a competitive edge, developing this robot is also another attempt to innovate long-standing designs in the RoboMaster community, where teams have relied on open-sourced designs dating back to 2021. In recent years, various bipedal wheel-legged robot solutions have been developed for both lab and commercial use, featuring different size, leg quantity, speed, and movement capabilities [3]. For the competition’s purposes, a wheel-legged robot would provide the capabilities for effective performance. A common type is the 2-linkage balancing robot with motors in the hips, knees, and ankles. This variant would struggle to create higher accelerations due to its more distributed mass. In contrast, the centralized hip and ankle motors in a four-linkage robot have a proximal mass, allowing for superior dynamics [4]. To meet the client’s speed and payload capacity requirement, the robot will feature motor-driven hip, and ankle joints that move in the 2D plane. References: [1] “RoboMaster | University League.” Accessed: Sep. 26, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.robomaster.com/en-US/robo/college-league?djifrom=nav [2] V. Klemm et al., “Ascento: A two-wheeled jumping robot,” presented at the Proceedings – IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2019, pp. 7515–7521. doi: 10.1109/ICRA.2019.8793792. [3] Q. Zhu et al., “Overview of structure and drive for wheel-legged robots,” Robot. Auton. Syst., vol. 181, p. 104777, Nov. 2024, doi: 10.1016/j.robot.2024.104777. [4] S. Wang et al., “Balance Control of a Novel Wheel-legged Robot: Design and Experiments,” in 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2021, pp. 6782–6788. doi: 10.1109/ICRA48506.2021.9561579.
Team members
Nathan Gold – facilitator
Boyue Wang – communicator
Lance Tan – accountant
Jackson Mattek – admin
Client
Lance Tan