Louka

Louka is a robot dog that is being purposefully designed not to be a generic quadrupedal chassis, but to replicate the experience of interacting with a dog. This design approach should result in a relatively low-cost hardware platform that sacrifices power and precision for compliance and resilience. So far, Louka is just a head on a test-pedestal while I design his body and start to program behaviors/interactions. The head is on a ball joint and is driven by two servos on RC-car spring-shocks. The jaw is driven by a small servo in the roof of the mouth. Next, he'll get capacitive touch sensors in a few zones on his head as well as sensors to tell when the shocks are being compressed.