The Titan 6 project seeks to build a two-meter tall six-legged “light-weight”robot with an electrical approach. The robot needs to climb over tall obstacles as well as hide behind them. The challenge in building such a robot is that as the robot size increases, so does the demand on its actuators. This unfortunately requires more mass in the power supply, drive train, and the actuators themselves. Our goal is to create innovative designs that break the curse of increased mass for increased size. The Titan 6 project endeavors to build a set of self-sufficient modular joints unified by a novel control architecture to build the two-meter legged robot that is robust, field-repairable, and an order of magnitude lighter than similarly sized systems.
To utilize the modularity foundation in the Biorobotics lab, the project has also developed two layers of modularity. The mechanical modularity allows the same robot actuators and links to be repeated in different joints and configurations. Second, the development of our electrical hardware and firmware can be easily adapted to other systems. This design has started a line of robots that we are still developing, with different size and shape, but under the same hardware and software protocol.
