Pandora
Description:
PANDORA is a bipedal general-purpose autonomous humanoid robot designed and built by the Virginia Tech TREC Lab. PANDORA is unique due to its structural design. The majority of the robot is 3D printed. This design allows for quicker turnaround times as the structural components can be printed in under two weeks.
I am one of the team managers for PANDORA. My team is responsible for all the low-level hardware, electrical components, and firmware. I implement workflow methods focused on agility to manage the team. We use SCRUM as our project management framework and integrate these workflow methods into our GitLab to maximize project development efficiency.
My contribution to this team is the development of low-level firmware for the microcontrollers on PANDORA. The code is written entirely using C and runs on Texas Instruments TM4C123GXL Tiva boards. The communication structure is organized in a distributed microcontroller system in which each Tiva is responsible for two joints on the humanoid. The firmware allows for low-level communication and data processing with all the necessary sensors on PANDORA. The microcontrollers are programmed to use EtherCAT technology for quick communication back to the high-level computer program which uses the IHMC open-source robotics software.
From the work done on PANDORA, I have constructed a low-level software framework that can be easily integrated for a variety of microcontroller applications to simplify development. The code for a variety of common sensors used with microcontrollers is provided as part of the framework to shorten the development time of low-level firmware. The development of this framework was a success and is now used across many projects in the Virginia Tech TREC Lab.
For more information on the developed framework, see below:
Nick Tremaroli 