Pneubotics
2015 ~ 2016
Part of the justification for hiring me at Otherlab (rather than a contractor) was that I would do the electrical engineering and embedded design for all of the robotics projects. One being the exoskeleton project that became Roam Robotics and the other being the Pneubotics platform which eventually became Canvas.
The goal of the Pneubotics project was to try and build a robot with air as the primary source of power in the actuators. The design used simple materials and methods and achieved a very high output torque to weight ratio. The actuators were built from custom blow-molded PET bottles that were corrugated so they could compress along their length. The majority of the structure support the actuators was nylon.
The bottles were arranged in packs of 4 or more to create a 2 degree-of-freedom joint. We controlled the pressure in the bottles as they pressed against circular nylon end plates to bend the joint into different configurations. Several of these packs were stacked together to build a robot arm with the desired range of motion.
I created the circuit boards, firmware and wired the first prototypes.
One of the final versions.
Each of the white cylinders is a custom built (at Otherlab) valve. Each board controls 4 valves and there are 2 valves per air chamber. I created the circuit boards and also wired up this particular prototype.
Another view showing how the two ends can be separated to help with assembly.
Maria Telleria (co-founder and CTO of the project) demonstrating an assisting application.
A three segment version used for very early prototyping of polishing/sanding applications. This marked the beginning of Pneubotics pivoting into Canvas.