Project Description

Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics department will be getting a pair of robot legs this fall. My project is to create a program that can accurately simulate the legs based on initial physical parameters and provides a user interface to change the initial parameters. I will be using Maya for the working environment and MEL to create the user interface. The code for the physical calculations will be provided by SD/FAST, a program which “provides (a) physically-based simulation of mechanical systems by taking a short description of an articulated system of rigid bodies (bodies connected by joints) and deriving the full nonlinear equations of motion for that system.” (sdfast.com) The program will be written in C++ and MEL and will be implemented as a Maya plugin.