  The objective of this work is to design a mechatronic bipedal robot with
mobility in 3D environments. The designed robot has a total of six actuated
degrees of freedom (DoF), each leg has two DoF located at the hip: one for
abduction/adduction and another for thigh flexion/extension, and a third DoF at
the knee for the shin flexion/extension. This robot is designed with point-feet
legs to achieve a dynamic underactuated walking. Each actuator in the robot
includes a DC gear motor, an encoder for position measurement, a flexible joint
to form a series flexible actuator, and a feedback controller to ensure
trajectory tracking. In order to reduce the total mass of the robot, the shin
is designed using topology optimization. The resulting design is fabricated
using 3D printed parts, which allows to get a robot's prototype to validate the
selection of actuators. The preliminary experiments confirm the robot's ability
to maintain a stand-up position and let us drawn future works in dynamic
control and trajectory generation for periodic stable walking.
