Custom Circuit Board Design for Wireless Tensegrity Robots

Tensegrity robotics is a hybridized form of soft and hard robots which is considered useful due to their ability to deform and take different shapes. This is enabled by their form of stabilization which is held together by the tension created by connecting the hard struts, with soft joints. In our new implementation, we use springs as our soft joints, and a custom designed printed circuit board as the hard strut. This custom board was previously designed such that it was wirelessly enabled to send and receive data, self-powered due to onboard batteries, and able to move through the pulsing of a DC vibration motor. The goal was and still is to control the dynamics of the robot through the vibrations of the struts to achieve controllable locomotion. The custom circuit board helps us achieve this by greatly reducing the amount of weight required for a hard strut, as instead of attaching electronics to acrylic, we’re able to combine the two components into one. In a continuation of this work, I have taken the previous strut design and expanded on it to not only allow the better testing of surface mounted components but also included surface mounted IR LEDs, which our Qualisys Motion Capture system has already been experimentally verified to be compatible with.