Theo Jansen inspired robot

Guest Post from Oschoe. Not strictly an NXT robot, but as it uses PowerFunction motors and receivers it wouldn't be difficult to automate it!

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.

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