ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

Walking robots have always seemed fascinating to me. There's something amazing about a robot walking like a real person or animal. That said, I've never actually built a walking robot of my own. I tried a couple times when the RIS was around, but didn't succeed. However, recently I've been thinking about how to make a quadruped robot using the TETRIX system with the NXT to get a larger and more powerful robot that could be capable of navigating the outdoors. Right now I don't have enough TETRIX materials to build one (they're pretty expensive), but I'm hoping to get them sometime in the near future. It's amazing how complex walking motion is! I may be wrong about this (I certainly can't prove that I'm right), but it seems to me that a quadruped needs at least 12 motorized joints to achieve full animal-like walking capabilities. Now, I know that many people have found great ways to achieve quadrupedal walking motion with much fewer motors, but I t...

Slightly more creepy version of the anthropomorphic legs that I posted earlier . I was able to get a more fluid motion out of the legs by not having the motor at the thigh wait for the completion of the motor at the knee.

Here's a fun project that simulates walking without the challenge of keeping the robot balanced and upright. Each leg is identical and is controlled by its own NXT. A leg starts off completely straight and when pivoted forward at the ankle, a touch sensor is activated which triggers a motor to bend the leg back at the knee and another motor to swing the leg forward at the hip. The process is repeated on both legs merely by leaning the robot forward so as to activate the touch sensor on the back ankle. I was thinking that a possible improvement would be to suspend the walker along a pulley.

This realistic looking Spider project will walk forward and backward in response to presses on the NXT buttons. Designing walking things is hard, and this project cheats in two ways. First, it doesn't carry the weight of the NXT (you hold that in your hand as a remote), and also it really only half walks -- it alternately steps on one side while rolling on the bottom side of the gears on the other side... But it looks like it's really walking! For a nice treatment of NXT animals that walk for real (including a non-cheating spider), see The LEGO Mindstorms NXT Zoo by contributor Fay Rhodes. What motivated this project was using the shape of the NXT motor as part of the visual design of the creature rather than just finding a way to get it in there and/or hiding it. I was struggling to use the NXT motor in another design, and suddenly it started looking like I was trying to strap a huge ant to the underside of a car or something... So I bailed out on that design and made a spid...