Description:

PANDORA is a bipedal general-purpose autonomous humanoid robot designed and built by the Virginia Tech TREC Lab. PANDORA is unique due to its structural design. The majority of the robot is 3D printed. This design allows for quicker turnaround times as the structural components can be printed in under two weeks. 

I was one of the team managers for PANDORA. My team was responsible for all the low-level hardware, electrical components, and firmware. I implemented workflow methods focused on agility to manage the team. We used SCRUM as our project management framework and integrated these workflow methods into our GitLab to maximize project development efficiency.

My contribution to this team was the development of low-level firmware for the microcontrollers on PANDORA. The code was written entirely using C and runs on Texas Instruments TM4C123GXL Tiva boards. The communication structure was organized in a distributed microcontroller system in which each Tiva was responsible for two joints on the humanoid. The firmware allowed for low-level communication and data processing with all the necessary sensors on PANDORA. The microcontrollers were programmed to use EtherCAT technology for quick communication back to the high-level computer program which used the IHMC open-source robotics software. 

Upon completion of PANDORA’s firmware, I constructed a low-level software framework that can be easily integrated for a variety of microcontroller applications to simplify development. The code for a variety of common sensors used with microcontrollers is provided as part of the framework to shorten the development time of low-level firmware. The development of this framework was a success and was used across many projects in the Virginia Tech TREC Lab. 

The work done on PANDORA was presented at the 2024 Humanoids conference in Nancy France; see the corresponding conference paper below. For more information about PANDORA, including the developed framework and other specifics, see the publications section of my website.