WORMS Hexapod (NASA BIG Idea Challenge 2022)

Walking Oligomeric Robotic Mobility System (WORMS) is an architecture that integrates several identical unit robots into a cohesive mobility system that allows behaviors such as walking, climbing, jumping, and more. With repeating units making up the whole, this architecture leads to robots that are highly scalable, mass producible, and reliable. See our team’s brief feature here.

As a grad student in 2022, I took part in MIT’s WORMS entry in NASA’s 2022 BIG Idea Challenge on novel mobility systems for lunar terrain. I mainly worked on a ROS Gazebo simulation for a hexapod WORMS configuration that demonstrates a walking gait across flat terrain and on an incline. I also led the requirements development for some aspects of the WORMS onboard autonomy stack.

Here is a short demo of a 1 legged wave gait in simulation: