quadruped-robot

A fully 3D-printed quadruped robot with 12 degrees of freedom — 3 per leg. Designed from scratch in SolidWorks with custom leg geometry optimised for printability and torsional stiffness. The goal was to achieve stable static walking gaits and demonstrate the inverse kinematics pipeline.

Quadrupeds are hard. The mechanical design has to constrain weight and print-time while maintaining the stiffness needed for dynamic loading. The IK solution for 3-DOF legs has multiple valid configurations — picking the right one based on gait phase requires a coherent state machine. And 3D-printed servo horns strip teeth under load, which I learned the hard way.

Solo project. Designed all mechanical parts in SolidWorks, iterated 4 versions of the leg assembly to get the joint geometry right. Wrote the IK solver in Python, implemented a trot gait state machine, and did structural validation of the hip joint under maximum stance load.

Partially functional — static stance and slow crawl gait demonstrated. Dynamic trot is still in progress (servo torque is the bottleneck). Full assembly published on GrabCAD. IK solver code open source.