Oricom Technologies
www.oricomtech.com |
| ||
November 2007: alas, T.J. has been disassembled in order to construct Poco the quadruped.
Namely, it occurred to us, after putting T.J. together, that T.J.'s upper joints might make nice rotatable shoulders for quadruped turning. See Poco. | ||
T.J. is a simple bipedal walking robot with 2-DOF in each leg, and is called "Toe-Jammer" for obvious reasons. With the initial feet shown, it turns out to be somewhat of a trick to get it to not jam-up its feet during common maneuvers. T.J. was basically patterned after David Buckley's biped Loki, after we noticed what a great leanover it could do (more on this later). David gets to use a neat milling machine, but all we have is a drill, hack saw, and file, so our designs are necessarily simpler. |
||
CONSTRUCTION Physical: Material: Controller: | ||
ACTION
|
Toe-Jammer takes a step. | |
LEARNING TO WALK
Getting Toe-Jammer to walk involves balance, movement, and avoidance of collision between toes & feet. On each side, rotation of 2 servos (ie, polar coordinate movements) map into linear (ie, cartesian coordinate) movements of the feet. In essence, as the "downed" (grounded) side lifts and rotates the opposite side, the servos on the oposite side must produce approximately equal and opposite compensatory rotations in order to keep the feet (a) level, and (b) parallel to each other. After some playing around, we realized the easiest way to proceed involved getting one foot alone to take a single step forwards and backwards, and repeating this for the other foot. The best sequence involved: This all sounds obvious, but building the gait one bit at a time was much easier than trying to build one complete step sequence from the get-go. |
© Oricom Technologies, May 2007 |