#walking machines

[stevebattle]

ODEX II (AKA 'Robin') by Odetics inc. (1986), Anaheim, California. The ODEX II with an extendable arm was developed for Savannah River Nuclear Labs. Robots are used in the nuclear industry as they can be used in radioactive environments, and as a hexapod walking machine it can step over obstacles, enabling it to work in cluttered areas. Odetics robot technology can be used to fight fires in nuclear facilities and clean up nuclear, biological, and other dangerous waste.

[daydreamsandpumpkinleaves]

[stevebattle]

Hexpod 1 by Tim Lewis (1999). This plucky little fella has fully articulated legs using fourteen servos. It's programmed in Forth using the New Micros 68HC11 Single Board Computer.

[stevebattle]

BORIS – a motorless six-legged walking machine by Roger Gilbertson (1993), Mondotronics. "Boris' simple design uses eight separate Muscle Wires to create all motions; one to make the forward/backward motion on each of the legs, and two wires for lifting alternating legs with each step." – Roger Gilbertson, Muscle Wires Project Book.

[stevebattle]

Omni-Bot by Frank Nickols (2003), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. This beautifully crafted six-legged omni-directional walking robot can not only walk in any direction, but can also combine rotation and translation at the same time in a manoeuvre called the 'Viennese waltz'. The angular position of its 18 servos are calculated 50 times per second by nine Basic Stamp microcontrollers, based on algorithms for integer mathematics using only 16 bit arithmetic. This approach rejects the use of trigonometric functions and look-up tables, using polynomial equations instead.

[stevebattle]

Cricket by Henry Arnold (1999), Robotics Society of Southern California. Cricket is an autonomous hexapod robot made from readily available materials. The simple design has inspired many people to make their own version. It walks using just three servo motors and avoids objects using its feelers, making various chirping sounds depending on which feeler touched the object. The brain of the Cricket is an on-board Parallax Stamp II microcontroller. Full instructions for building your own cricket are available on Henry's website.

[stevebattle]

iSprawl (independent Sprawl) by Sangbae Kim (2003), Stanford Center for Design Research. A limiting factor in the design of the Sprawl robots has been their use of pistons for propulsion. Instead of hydraulics, iSprawl investigates the use of low-friction push/pull cables, like bicycle brake cables. A motorised crank drives six multi-strand steel cables in teflon sheaths, which feed directly into the legs. These are grouped into threes, each group 180° out of phase with the other, so as to drive alternate leg tripods. It can be steered using servos mounted at the hips of the middle legs, that change the leg angles. The axial compliance of the legs are carefully adjusted to produce a smooth energy efficient sinusoidal trajectory of the body, enabling it to run at 15 body-lengths per second, or over 2.3m/s.

[stevebattle]

T-Hex (Twin Hexapod robots) by Hiroshi Kimura (1997), University of Electro-Communication, Chofu, Tokyo. How can we use multiple robots perform a task under the control of a single human operator? Controlling multiple robots at the same time is difficult for humans, so in these experiments they operate just one robot while another autonomous robot does its best to help. They work by recognising what the other robot is doing, using machine vision to model, and then mirror, the positions of the body and legs of their twin. They can manipulate boxes with their forelegs, while walking on their middle and hind legs like a quadruped.