Inqster - Psychosis

I have to preface this post or you won't get far before bouncing... I set pretty high goals for myself.  I don't often make them, but I always learn something and have fun doing it.  But... Who am I to think I can compare to MIT and Boston Dynamics?  

Goal - I want to design/build/program a bi-pedal robot that can run a 10K.  Just to make it a little more challenging, I want to program it to learn.  I will not explicitly program the choreograph necessary to make a step.  I feel that is counter productive as the dynamics for each speed increase will nullify the previous choreograph.  I'll use AI and machine learning techniques to allow it to learn  to sit-up, stand-up, walk, run and then run efficiently at various speeds.  Don't worry, I'll get over this psychosis soon and start an easier project. 😉 

I have a lot of enjoyable reading to do on this forum of your all's robot projects.  However, I wanted to start nibbling away at my greatest deficiency in this project and that is the electronic hardware side.  I did a search on the forum for "Trinamic".  I only got one hit, but am hoping that there is more experience here.

My 3D Printer has this type of driver and it is my current understanding that it can detect when it hits a stop or even feels resistance mid stroke.  I gather it has a feedback loop to measure electrical current used to achieve the desired position.  I expect to use these drivers to (1) detect the limits of mechanical limbs extremes and (2) to use the feedback into the machine learning algorithms for quantifying and learning/optimizing for power efficiency.

I have some stepper motors and I have some TMC2209 Trinamic drivers coming.  I've found the Arduino library https://github.com/janelia-arduino/TMC2209 .  

Questions

1. Does anyone have any experience with these or any other Trinamic drivers?
2. Are there others I should investigate?
3. Can I both control and get the current feedback using Arduino (actually ESPs) and the above Arduino libraries?
4. Is there any other feedback data I can get from these?  I'm particularly interested in detecting skipped steps.  They're easy to see in a 3D Print, just wondering if they are detectable on the electronic/software side of the motor.

I'm sure I'll have far more questions about raising Inqster, but this will do for my first post on the forum.

VBR,

Inq