Sally the Supermander.

Abstract: The objective of this senior design project was to design and build a robotic salamander, then to realize some basic locomotion gait for it. Naturally, motor technology being what it is, this robot is bigger than your typical salamander.

A group of intrepid seniors in the School of Electrical Engineering, with an assist by seniors in Mechanical Engineering, elected to help us out with the design and building of a robotic salamander. Based on her size, the team called her Supermander. Though, I sometimes think they went for a combination of Superman and salamander since the research ultimately will support search and rescue types of applications. Based on our lab naming convention, we dubbed her Sally. Hence, Sally the Supermander. Here she is in action:

The senior design team did a great job creating the snake model, considering alternative foot designs, and packaging it all up. They even documented some of their efforts. Our job now is to apply the same modeling tools to Sally that we have to Snakey. One of the members of the senior design team, Alex Popescu, stayed on as a BS/MS student and got some closed-loop control working using our overhead tracking system. Unfortunately, his hard drive crashed, so we have to re-code from an earlier copy of the code on git. Lesson to all: always commit even if you think the code is ugly. Better ugly and available than ugly and lost. Oh, and a hard drive is either dead or dying. Back it up.

Alex is now at Texas A&M Studying Tensegrity. Maybe he'll make a tensegrous salamander!