Current members recruited:
Myself (David Alvarado)
Phillip Zak
So once again, the project I am proposing for the final of this class is a walking spider-like robot. In my earlier posts, I had posted things such as designs to base this project off of and parts that I’ll need. Before I start, I’d like to say that for this project, I have taken upon the programming role for this project. Philip will assist as well in this.
So for the programming portion of this project, I’ll start of with the obvious: servo motors. For motors, I already have example code to work with from the arduino site http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Sweep.
I figure for this project I”ll need 8 motors exactly for the “shoulder” and “elbow” joints. I don’t believe it’ll be much of a problem to program since I’ve done some mass multi-line code before. The idea for a walk cycle that I have is that it will continuously move forward and I know it seems strange since the question of “What if it runs into a wall?” will pop up but that’s when I segway into the next thing this project will need which are sensors.
When I say sensors, I mean sensors for detecting when there obstructions ahead. For what sensor specifically I need that does this, I don’t know! but I will be looking for it soon. I’ve had some experience coding for sensors so I might have some difficulty but I’m sure its nothing I can’t handle.
Like I said in one of my previous posts (#2), I want this to be autonomous, meaning something that will not need any user input and can function on its own. I can’t really foresee any issues with this but I’ve learned many times that nothing is easy in life so how this will go is unknown.
Some more things I can think of that are menial to me are putting in LEDs for acting as indicators if the all the parts are functioning. I’ve thought of also putting in an accelerometer for sensing its position. This would actually be really neat if I could figure out how to make it so that it would output more power to certain legs when climbing uphill for example.
Well that’s all I got for now.
