Welcome to Minipupper Kinematics
Contents
Welcome to Minipupper Kinematics#
About this book#
This book contains my notes and Jupyter notebooks that I created while gaining a better understanding of the kinematics of a quadruped robot in general and MangDang Minipupper in particular.
We cover the mathematics for 2D and 3D movements and develop different gaits for the robot. The Jupyter notebooks contain the code that will illustrate the theoretical background. But theory and reality do not always match. We provide a simulation environment using the real-time physics simulation pybullet and an execution environment that can be installed on a Minipupper so that we can upload leg trajectories to the physical robot and have them executed. We also provide a web-based controller so that we can control the simulated or physical Minipupper from any web browser including a smartphone.
- 2D Coordinate systems
- Unified Robotics Description Format
- 2D Leg Movement
- Minipupper leg movements
- Discussion of a paper
- Gaits for Minipupper
- 3D Coordinate Systems
- Rigid-body kinematics
- A Fresh Look at Gaits
- Parameters
- Visualization and Simulation Environments
- Software frameworks for the development of robotic systems
A word of caution#
This work is a product of my learning effort, not the product of an expert in the field. If I would write it again I would certainly to things differently. But I still hope if will be of use to the reader.
How to install#
Installation on a PC#
The goal is to focus on portable Python code to be able to run it in any Python virtual environment. We make heavy use of Jupyter Lab
Clone the repository
Create a Python virtual environment
cd into the repository
run “./install.sh”
Use the development environment#
cd into the repository
start Jupyter lab with “jupyter lab jupyternb”
Use the simulation environment#
run “minipupper –help” for instructions on how to use this command
run “web-controller” and point your browser at the URL shown on the screen
Installation on Minipupper#
Use a SD card that has been configured with minipupper_base Use Ubuntu 22.04 as this is the only version we have tested with so far.
Clone this repository
cd into the repository
run ./install.sh
reboot
point your web browser at http://xx.xx.xx.xx:8080 where xx.xx.xx.xx is the IP address of your minipupper
For development your can also:
run “minipupper execute –help”
run “minipupper walk” and adjust parameters for your use case