Biomimicry: Designing and Building a Multilegged Robot

I designed and built a robot we call the ``centipede''. As the name suggests, this is a multilegged device that competed in the 2017 Colorado Space Grant Consortium robot challenge in which robots are to make their way to a radio beacon while autonomously navigating an obstacle course designed to thwart their progress. I have built prototype legs (using a 3-D printer and some servo motors) driven by an algorithm which maintains the marching order of the legs and allows for steering control. The algorithm alone presents several interesting challenges such as getting the legs to move in a manner like a wave train and dealing with robot stability during motion.