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WSU Robotics Club is the hub for general robotics at Washington State University. After facing significant challenges over the past five years, we are ready to return stronger than ever!
This year marks a fresh start as we rebuild the club into the premier destination for students passionate about programming and engineering.
However, we quickly discovered that the club was missing the essential tools and materials needed to bring our projects to life—even basic items like a proper screwdriver set. This is where your support can make a difference.
WSU Robotics Club was once a large community, boasting over 60 members who split up into subteams and worked on projects such as a prosthetic hand, a camera drone, a robotic arm for chess, a BB-8 clone, a beer pong robot, and even competed in Battlebots and the Mars Rover Challenge. Despite the successes pre-COVID, the club fell by the wayside over the past 5 years. When we became execs of the club this year, there were no active members and no active projects. We found our website to be down since 2019, our email inaccessible, and the drawers do not contain a complete set of screwdrivers.
Even though we’re starting from scratch, we are confident that our efforts will create a collaborative space for students interested in automation, machine learning, and human-machine interaction, as well as those passionate about design, programming, and manufacturing. Together, they’ll be able to innovate, have fun, and produce something remarkable.
We started this year by building a 3DoF robotic arm to test the Cybergear motors, which are one of the most cost-effective BLDC (Brushless DC) motors on the market. After testing the motor's torque and thermal performance, we started designing a robotic dog (shown below) inspired by the MIT Mini Cheetah, Cheetah 3, and the Unitree Go2. It will have 12 motors on board, making it a great testbed for any programs we plan to implement. The quadruped design comprises 4 similar leg units and a chassis designed to be modular for future iterations.
With the guidance of our advisor, Dr. John Swensen, we will transform the quadruped robot from just being able to walk to a machine that can sense surroundings and maintain balance. We will add camera and LiDaR modules, Internal Measurement units, and GPU units and program in features such as object recognition, collision avoidance, auto-balancing, and route guidance. With these programming-intensive tasks in the future, we also plan on developing a 6DoF robot arm that can be attached to the robot dog and enable it to interact with its surroundings.
The price of a pack of heat-set inserts, perfect for threading fasteners into plastic parts!
Gets us a single 56V ODESC motor controller, used to control brushless DC motors accurately.
The price of a single Cybergear Motor, enough to power a single joint.
