Brief overview: Our project was to consist of a walking autonomous spider-bot. We ended up with a robot with 4 legs that struggles to walk a meter. This is our journey.
http://youtu.be/wgu6bYr5Jno
Full Documentation: Our ideal goal was to get an autonomous octopodal robot walking. We mange to get a quadropedic robot limping. As simple as that may sound it was quite the challenge for our team to get a legs working the way we wanted. Our first and reoccurring hurdle was the parts. I was mainly in charge of building the legs as such and the fact that we were using a kit that was designed to make a robotic arm. My first attempts at the legs were less than stellar in fact some of them were just not functional or practical. After a couple of try we made something that could be called leg number 1.
Once we had leg number 1, I handed that it to David and Philip to start wiring to the arduino duemilanove with a bread board and programing. They had problems trying to get the servos on the legs working like they wanted but that was fix with a couple of examples and some programing. As they were working I making revisions to the leg and ended up with what i taught was the our final version of the leg it was dub “leg 3.0”. With leg 3.0 complete and the code working the way it should i started making more legs and we decided it would be in our best interest to move on the the arduino mega board with a bread board instead of the arduino duemilanove. That switch was made simple because that board has more pins and it has more power.
Now we had 4 legs that need to be programed and wired up to the board. As David finalize the code, Philip started wiring everything together and I was attaching the legs to the a base that came with our kit. Then we realize we didn’t have enough power to run all the servos. We then took the power supply that came with it and strip it down to it power and ground cables and solder some wires on to the tips. Now this is where we made the mistake of not properly labeling ground and power cables but lucky we tested it on a single servo that then proceed to start smoking. We later realized the we had the power and ground cable mix up and put them in the wrong place. After we fix that and wired everything to where to had to go our robot was able to walk, sort of.
Our next step in this project would have been to make the legs and the body more compatible with each other. Our main problem right now is that the legs are and the body aren’t made out of the best materials. This results in the legs acting all weak and crashing into each other. So if we were to optimize the legs and the body we wouldn’t have the legs crashing into each other and the they would support themselves better.
