Evodyne Robotics Research Lab Makes Rapid Progress

Our Robotics Research Lab together with the Emergence Track team have made groundbreaking strides on the EvoDroid project along several fronts:

EvoRaptor - Small Bipedal Robot for Gait Research

The EvoRaptor project aims to quickly build a fully functional smaller biped robot to allow for research and development on the challenging balancing gait algorithms needed. This project implements several advanced engineering concepts including:

• Mujoco - Google Deepmind's Advanced Physics Simulator

• Uses smaller versions of Evodyne's new Quantum Flux Diffusion Actuator

• High speed CAN communication

• Advanced CAD modeling and mechanical engineering concepts

• Advanced electronics, PCB Design

Humanoid Hand Project

How do you make a functional full size humanoid hand that is lightweight and strong enough to crush an empty can of soda, yet gentle enough to safely handle an egg?

Members working on this project are doing extensive research and testing on various types of mechanisms, actuators, linkages and sensors. They started with the question: "How does a single human finger work, biologically, mechanically and functionally?". As a result of furious iteration, we now have a working prototype of a finger, making the remaining challenges more approachable.

Evodyne's Quantum Flux Diffusion Actuator

EvoDrive Motor Controller

A robotic actuator needs a smart, high-current, high-performance controller to be usable for its task. Bit by bit, the members of this team have optimized the design of our EvoDrive Brushless Motor Controller With Dual Input/Output Encoder capability, integrated cooling, and several other features including communication via USB-C, CAN Bus, Wifi, Bluetooth, while gaining expertise in advanced areas of Electrical Engineering.

High-Precision Dual Encoder Manufacturing

Making a high-power, high-precision robotic actuator from scratch is no mean feat. Every component needs to be tested during various phases of assembly. For an actuator, the position encoder is one of the most important sub-components. It combines technology from several disciplines into an extremely tiny package, and determines the power flow inside the actuator during operation hundreds of thousands of times a second. Therefore even the testing equipment for such a device is a complex engineering project.

Actuator Design and Manufacturing

Evodyne's actuators implement a new and unique compact and lightweight gearbox design for maximum torque density. Members of this team have begun to master advanced Mechanical Engineering concepts while being hard at work constructing the gearboxes and actuators with the intricate components involved, while discovering issues and fixing the original design as they go along.

Head and Neck Assembly/Design

This seems trivial, however the electro-mechanical attachment of a humanoid head to the torso is anything but. It must carry the weight and momentum of a head filled with instrumentation, mechanisms, cameras while the lower body of the robot is going through various movements and impacts. Members of this project are working to simultaneously maximize strength and fluidity of motion, so communication with the robot feels as natural as possible. Addtionally, a web interface to easily control the assembly is necessary during testing and development.

Human-Humanoid Robot Interaction

There was once the popular field of "Human Computer Interaction", which is now in the process of being replaced by the uncharted complexity of "Human Humanoid Interaction".

From a software standpoint, this is one of the most challenging parts of the project. How do you make sense of everything a robot camera is seeing around it, in real-time so as to "understand" what is going on, who is talking to it, and what must be done next?

Members of this team have all gained expertise in programming with ROS2 while implementing various machine learning models for human Pose Detection, Face Detection and Recognition, Object Detection and Segmentation, Emotion Detection, Gesture Recognition, Speech Recognition and Generation, 3D Stereo Depth Processing using Intel Realsense Depth cameras, 3D Matrix math for world space transformations, Fiducial marker detection and localization, and other advanced topics in image processing. The standalone Head/Neck assembly described above will serve as the testbed for human-robot interaction while the larger robot is slowly built up.

This group will begin to lean seriously into more complex AI topics as the work progresses.

Reflection on Progress, and Looking Ahead

As I guide and oversee the activities of the large and diverse teams working on all these sub-projects, I am most happy to note the improvement nearly everyone has made on learning to work with others. The respect of your peers is earned only when you show patience and integrity along with technical skill. As everyone gets better, I can already see our progress accelerating. Stay tuned for the next update!

Be A Part of The Journey!