What is qped?

Qped is a hardware robotics project documenting the early design of a four legged, or quadruped, robot. It uses capstan drives, a mechanical setup where a motor pulls a cable or tendon to move a joint, and the design has 12 degrees of freedom, meaning 12 independently controllable axes of movement spread across the four legs. The README is short and the project is at a very early stage. Right now the repository only contains the first design iteration, modeled in Fusion360 purely to get a rough visual estimate of the robot's shape. There are no active joints yet, the robot as modeled cannot move on its own, it simply floats in place in the 3D model. All four legs come from a single leg design that is mirrored and reused, rather than being modeled individually. What the repository provides today is a set of STL files, a common 3D printable file format, for the whole quadruped assembly as well as for a single leg on its own. Three reference images are included showing isometric, top, and side views of the first iteration. The README lists planned future work rather than finished features: adding revolute joints so the static model can actually move, converting the design to URDF, a standard robot description format used in robotics software, and testing room navigation in the Gazebo simulator alongside ROS, the Robot Operating System. None of that future work is implemented in the repository yet, so anyone looking at this project today is looking at a static mechanical concept model rather than a working robot.