I am fascinated with designing and building mechanisms that move, favorably without the use of wheels... I love stepping, folding, rotating, walking, jumping, flying and squirming mechanisms that move. This blog shows one of my tries in building a bot moving in an unorthodox way...
When I started actually building my designs I looked around for easily available, reusable components with sufficient technical components and controller possibilities and I ran into the LEGO Mindstorms series. After a few try-outs I started building simple multi-legs steppers with synchronized leg-movement. If you are interested; check my youtube channel
The design
A while ago I ran into the moving artwork by a Dutch artist named Theo Jansen, "het strandbeest". After re-watching the various (mostly lousy quality) movies on the web I decided to take the basics of the design and build my own version of a walking-bot.
The build
I started off with a very simple drawing of the legs and the motion required. After some trial and error with the ratio's of the legs I managed to get the basic movement just right. After collecting enough of the right pieces I tried to build a 6legged version but getting that to run stable proved difficult. I decided to add two more legs and that made it run much more smooth. After a couple of runs of the 8-legged version it was obvious the legs did not have enough grip on the surface of the test area (my table :-)) I added 'feet'; the parts touching the surface are made of rubber and that did the trick.
For anyone interested in more building details ; check the 'stills' halfway the movie for hints.
6 comments:
Nice article. Thanks
Very nice. I imagine that this version does not turn, just based on what I saw in the video. Looks like that would be the next stage, to see about powering the 2 sides independently so that one side can stop while the other is moving, hopefully providing a pivoting effect around the stopped side.
hi
if you can take some fotos of the other side we will be grateful
hi
if you can take some fotos of the other side we will be grateful
thanks
hi I have just make it one and its preaty cool wen i've made the video I will publish here
jorge
hi im tetrixgear and that is my video
damien i have had only a problem that you will see in the video it goes right doing circles,do you know how can I solve that problem
video link : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJoeGLp4C7s&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
thanks
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