534: I Think We'll Add a Head

Aaed Musa joins us to talk about building robot dogs, custom actuators, and his YouTube channel. He shares how he moved from 3D-printing servo robots in his parents' garage to designing capstan drives, and how he uses reinforcement learning to train quadrupedal walking gaits. We also talk about his senior design project (CARA 2.0), his Spider-Man web-shooter build, lessons in storytelling and video editing, and why he's starting a company to bring friendly, expressive quadrupeds into the home.

Aaed Musa is a mechanical engineering graduate from Purdue University, a hardware creator on YouTube, and co-founder of the robotics startup Mecha.

DISCUSSION RESOURCES & LINKS AAED'S CHANNELS & PROJECTS:

• Aaed Musa on YouTube: Project videos covering quadrupedal robot dogs, Spider-Man web shooters, and custom actuators. Oh, and planetary gears.

• More detailed project write ups are under projects on his personal site, including CARA 2.0.

• Github repository

• Robots Everywhere with Aaed Musa | The Amp Hour

ROBOTICS & ACTUATOR TECH:

• Dyneema DM20: synthetic rope with zero creep used in zero-backlash capstan drives

• NVIDIA Isaac Sim: simulation and reinforcement learning environment for robotics

• OpenMV: Very smart MicroPython-powered machine vision modules. Kwabena Agyeman has spoken with us about OpenMV before:

  • 497: Everyone Likes Tiny

  • 477: One Thousand New Instructions

  • 212: You Are in Seaworld

SOME YOUTUBE CHANNELS MENTIONED:

• Good 3d printing youtube channels:

  • 3DPrintingNerd

  • CNCKitchen

  • MadeWithLayers

• Jeremy_Fielding: great for explaining how things work and coming at engineering from a non engineering direction (Embedded 385: I Just Wanted an Industrial Arm)

• James Bruton: Robot dogs!

• Mark Rober has fantastic storytelling and approachable engineering.

• Stuff Made Here has robots and gadgets, generally a broad scope of engineering.