Maker Builds CARA 2.0, a Better Robot Dog That Doesn’t Cost a Fortune
SMRTR summary
What if a tennis ball could make a robot walk better? That quirky design choice is one reason CARA 2.0, a student-built quadruped robot, moves with surprising grace.
Mechanical engineering student Aaed Musa led a small team to reinvent their earlier robot dog from the ground up, staying under a thousand dollars and twenty pounds.
The team rewound cheap drone motors into higher-torque actuators, producing an impressive 12 newton-meters of peak torque for about 80 dollars each. One motor ran for over a thousand hours with minimal wear.
Asymmetrical legs had caused earlier versions to drift sideways, so the team rebuilt the geometry entirely and swapped rigid printed feet for squash balls, dramatically improving grip and stability.
The finished robot, at 18.2 pounds, walks at 1.8 feet per second, carries a 15-pound payload, handles hills, lawns, and uneven terrain, and can even jump four and a half inches off the ground.
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to TechEBlog.
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