CHOITEK CAT ROBOT

At my summer internship at Choitek Inc, a startup founded by a CMU alumni, I was in charge of creating a quadrupedal robot prototype, dubbed “Catbot” that could be used for robotics education. It consisted of an Arduino Mega 2560, a servo shield, and 12 servos, mounted into a 3D printed body and legs. One of the challenges we found was the hassle in having to disassemble an entire leg in order to replace one servo on it; this was remedied by having servos pull linkages that move the joints rather than be mounted at the joints directly. This sacrificed some range of motion, but made maintenance much more convenient. A key design philosophy I learned from this project was to always design around the geometry and function of the external parts for the project; in Catbot’s case, the servos and the circuits.