HOPPY: An Open-source Kit for Education with Dynamic Legged Robots
This provides a practical tool for robotics students and educators to study dynamic locomotion, though it is incremental as it adapts existing concepts into an educational kit.
The authors tackled the problem of making dynamic legged robots accessible for education by introducing HOPPY, an open-source, low-cost kit that bridges theory with real systems, achieving hopping velocities up to 1.7 m/s with a simple controller.
This paper introduces HOPPY, an open-source, low-cost, robust, and modular kit for robotics education. The robot dynamically hops around a rotating gantry with a fixed base. The kit is intended to lower the entry barrier for studying dynamic robots and legged locomotion with real systems. It bridges the theoretical content of fundamental robotic courses with real dynamic robots by facilitating and guiding the software and hardware integration. This paper describes the topics which can be studied using the kit, lists its components, discusses preferred practices for implementation, presents results from experiments with the simulator and the real system, and suggests further improvements. A simple heuristic-based controller is described to achieve velocities up to 1.7m/s, navigate small objects, and mitigate external disturbances when the robot is aided by a counterweight. HOPPY was utilized as the subject of a semester-long project for the Robot Dynamics and Control course at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The positive feedback from the students and instructors about the hands-on activities during the course motivates us to share this kit and continue improving in the future.