Little Walker

lilwalker

This little walking robot caught our eye. We’ve seen tons of 4 legged bots, but the design on this probably took more effort than the electronics. The design is radially symmetrical, it can walk in any direction, turn in place, and even walk upside down. The electronics weren’t forgotten though. This little bugger manages to pull a half our of use out of each battery charging. It communicates wirelessly with a custom dual Wiimote Nunchuck setup via XBEE modules. You can find much more technical details in the captions of the pictures. We’re not positive what processing power is hidden in the bot itself, but we know there’s an Arduino in one of the nunchucks. This might be the brains of the operation leaving the hardware on the bot simply to control the servos. We really like the arc-reactor-esque power display.

35 thoughts on “Little Walker

  1. Hello. This is the creator of the robot in question. Quite surprised to see so much interest in my little toy. I will try and get some video of it walking up soon.

    To answer the question in the post – there’s essentially no processing being done in the robot, just a Pololu board which takes serial data commands from the radio link and translates them into servo pulses. All the processing for walking and leg movement is done in the arduino I crammed into one of the nunchuks.

    This version of the robot I’ve been working on for about two years, on and off, as a fun side project to take along to gaming conventions and such to entertain people with. Building something that can put in severah hours of walking time over the course of a weekend without destroying itself is actually pretty challenging.

  2. I am not surprised at the lack of negative comments – this kicks ass. Again not my thing, but its overwhelmingly obvious a lot of thought, development, and time went into making this.
    In other words, someone gave a shit.

    If it were just another altoids tin with an arduino and a cheap servo duct taped onto it, you can bet your shorts there would be some snarky comments, but this kind of thing is what hackaday is for people.

  3. @stunmonkey- Exactly, this is what hackaday is about. This isn’t just a blog about someone who spend a weekend screwing around with an arduino, it’s a real project that someone cared about.

  4. @k0ldBurn

    I’m glad at least someone feels the same way. I really love well thought out projects like this or the paintball turret, and there are a lot of them happening. I’d like to see more covered here.

    More projects like this one!

  5. Wow, that has some really fluid movement. Can I make a design suggestion? I noticed the robot had lower mobility when on a smooth surface, what about putting rubber balls on the ends of the legs instead of what looks like brass?

    That is an awesome robot either way. I loved the flipping over.

  6. I had rubber feet on an earlier version of this. I found that a hard surface like brass works better on carpet – the rubber had too much traction for the robot to walk smoothly. Rubber works better on a hard smooth surface, but I decided to optimize for carpet.

    I have put up a blog with more information. Link is on the photo set site and through my name here.

  7. Nice Blog and thanks for the response. I can understand what you mean. Optimize it for the environment expected. I didn’t realize you used spring tension on the legs. Good idea.

  8. I don’t think it looks like a headcrab, maybe the Dragoons from starcraft but not headcrab. People keep suggesting different foot designs, maybe the next model could have small tachikoma style wheels. Just free spinning wheels that wouldn’t do much on carpet but allow it to almost ‘skate’ over hard surfaces. It’s a thought..

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