Walker – A quadruped robot

This was my final project for How To Make Almost Anything

I wanted to build a simple robot that could walk around and explore its environment, furthermore I wanted to build as much of it as I could custom so the sonar sensor is custom made, the servo controller is custom made and the control logic as well.  It was meant to be able to carry a sensor of some sort ( a microphone, wi-fi camera, motion sensor or whatever ) and go into unmapped terrain (my friends’ offices) and gather intelligence.

An earlier version of the robot

I wanted to build a quadruped as opposed to the popular hexapods because it posed more of a challenge to design gait patterns for four legs rather than six because with six legs the robot is always stable when it lifts one of its legs up to move it. You can see in my last video that the robot shifts its weight whenever it wants to lift up a leg, this is to move its center of mass into the polygon of support between the three remaining legs.

Shows the internals of the robot, yeah wires

This robot uses a custom servo controller I designed, the design can be viewed in this post: http://siggi.scripts.mit.edu/projects/?p=83

The robot also uses a custom sonar sensor for obstacle avoidance, the design can be viewed in this post: http://siggi.scripts.mit.edu/projects/?p=67

A video of the finished robot, doing a random walk with obstacle avoidance.

thanks to Ástþór for the beats