2010-09-16 » My next robot

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been really busy with work. Because of that, I’ve not spent as much time thinking about my next robot as I would have liked. That doesn’t mean I’ve completely given up on it though! Bob needs some company!

I’ve pretty much decided that my next robot will have legs. While you might be thinking 2 legs, I’m thinking that’s just not enough. For a couple reasons, I think that having more legs will be better. It will be easier to balance for one. Having 2 legs means you’ve only got one on the surface when you’re walking. That means lots of tricky balance. With 6, I can have the robot walk while always keeping 3 on the ground which should keep it pretty stable.

Plus, 6 legs looks way cool!

One big disadvantage to more legs is cost. For each leg of the robot, I’m going to need 3 servos to get the range of motion that I want. Basically two servos move the “hip” joint, forward, back, in and out and the other servo acts like a “knee”. Its walking motion would probably be something like a spider or an ant. The picture at the top of this post should give you some idea of what I’m talking about (click on the image to go to the site of the person who created that one, inc. video). With 3 servos per leg though I’ll need a whopping 18 servos just to move the 6 legs. That’s going to get pretty expensive. Even before building any controls.

I think what I’m going to do in order to get started is order 6 servos and the controller board I want to use this time (from Pololu). Once I get those I can start doing some initial testing and get an idea for how I’m going to construct this thing. I should also be able to begin some initial tests with the servo controls. I’ll post another update once I’ve actually got something more to say about this project.

If you have any ideas or suggestions that you think might inspire me, please email them to josh@wilsdon.ca with the subject “Robot Ideas”.