Project SPLITTER

SPLITTER in Planetary Exploration

Project SPLITTER is our foundational work for our upcoming agile modular robot.

We have developed:

• A new cycloidal gear-based quasi direct drive actuator.
• A multi-modal foot grasping end effector with a total of 8-axis force sensing.
• An inertial morphing Model Predictive Controller for space exploration.

SPLITTER is designed to achieve enhanced multi-modal locomotion capabilities beyond our MOBIUS.

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Cycloidal Gear Quasi Direct Drive (CQDD) Actuator

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  CQDD Exploded View

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  CQDD in Motion

• CQDD Actuator, ICRA25 Paper

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Multi-Modal End Effector with 8-axis Force Sensing

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• In MOBIUS, the hands work as feet when doing quadruped locomotion

  • Flat feet are ideal for static cases
  • Linear feet are ideal for dynamic locomotion
  • Hands need to grasp objects

  Need for multi-modal foot-gripper

MAGPIE

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  MOBIUS example

• MAGPIE Grasping

• Magnetic Interference Detection

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  3D Hall Effect Sensor Based Force Sensing Mechanism

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  Total 8-axis contact and grasping force sensors

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  Possible sensitivity and force ranges with different materials

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  Sensor Mechanism Design

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  • Our computational design framework lets us design the force range and sensitivity of the 3D Hall effect-based force sensing.
  • By changing the magnet sizing, positioning, and beam parameters, we can design the desired force sensing characteristics.
  • Our framework generates an ideal model.

• MAGPIE Website

  • Computational Framework Codes and APIs Doc
  • Consider magnetic interferences
  • Our stacked Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) based mean variance estimator
  • Ideal model with Gaussian radial basis functions (GRBF)

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• MAGPIE and force sensing, ICRA25 Paper

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Inertial Morphing MPC and SPLITTER for space exploration

• Inertial Morphing MPC, AeroConf25 Paper

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Publications

• CQDD Actuator, ICRA25
• MAGPIE and force sensing, ICRA25
• Inertial Morphing MPC, AeroConf25