Behold the Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod (DASH). The video above was presented at the 2009 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. In it we see the toils of a team from UC Berkeley’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab. They’ve developed a robot propulsion system that mimics some of the best aspects of cockroaches and other insect bodies: speed, economy of motion, ability to survive large falls without damage, and the capability to traverse obstacles. Let’s take a look at how they put this together after the break. Read the rest of this entry »
At Berkeley, they’re coming up with new ways to make their itty bitty hexapods. These are basically tiny flatpacked bodies cut from cardboard. The end goal is to not only make them smaller and faster to build, but to reduce the friction in the joints. You can download the files on their site as well as download movies of them in action. For a larger and somewhat less complicated flatpacked robot, check out the flatpacked 2 motor walker.
We’ve postedmanymanytimesabout hexapods. One of the most common comments, aside from how creepy they are, is about their speed. Hexapods are generally pretty slow. These little bots are quite a bit different though. The Sprawl and iSprawl, are anything but slow. Using a hybrid leg mechanism that aims its piston like “toes”, they mimic the motion of cockroaches. The video shows the speed can be pretty quick, especially the iSprawl in the second half. The leg mechanism the Sprawl is air powered, while the iSprawl uses a push/pull cable transmission system. As pointed out at BotJunkie, it’s nice for the “i” in iSprawl to actually mean something. It stands for “independent”.
We know it was just two days ago that we were ranting about the hexapods known as Phoenix, and their creator [Zenta]. In the comments on that post, [Bluehash] pointed us to [Zenta's] latest creation. This is A-pod. The sheer articulation and believable motion here made this robot worthy of a post all it’s own. A-pod has a 2 dof “tail” and a 3 dof head with a total of 25 servos to drive it. The addition of the head adds so much character, add some face tracking and it would really blow us away. Well, after it fetched us a beer. He notes that he’s still working on the leg mechanicals, so it doesn’t do much walking yet.
The Phoenix is a very impressive hexapod robot platform. It has 18 servos which gives each leg 3 degrees of freedom and a BasicAtom Pro 28 for the brains. Interestingly, the design started as a personal project of a forum member on the Lynxmotion forums. It turned out so well, it has become an actual product. We’ve seen videos of these before and they always have some pretty fluid and organic seeming motion. They seem almost alive in this configuration. The only thing that might make them scarier would be to add Lou Vega’s decapitated head, well maybe that plus some really nice face tracking. In the video above, you can see where someone paired one up with a Wiimote for a pretty intuitive control scheme. Yeah, we realize the video is nearly a year old, how did we miss this one? You can see a video of it walking around after the break, and another controlled by a ps2 controller.
[Kiethrobot] built this six legged little helicopter. You can see that it is fairly mobile. You can also see that it doesn’t really make it off the ground really well. He must have gotten more power out of it though because he destroyed it in a crash the day after filming this. It is surprising how much character those six little legs add to the RC helicopter. This thing is almost as cute as something from crabfu.
Who hasn’t fantasized about riding on a hexapod robot? With these detailed instructions, you very well could be living out your fantasy very soon. As you can see in the video, they opted for connected legs instead of 6 independent ones, so your dreams of riding the dancing Lou Bega bot may have to wait for another day.
This hexapod was sent to us on the tipline from [Jamie]. If you want to take the six-legged robot a bit farther than our earlier posts, here and here, this is the hexapod for you. The structural pieces were modeled, and cut out of 3mm thick plywood using CNC. He used TO-220 transistor nylon isolation mounts for the bearings, and bolts and locknuts at each joints. The main body houses eight servos, six for the legs and two for a camera head pan and tilt. There are another six servos, one for each leg, to lift the feet. The whole thing is controlled by an Atmel AT90S8515 clocked at 8 Mhz. The code was compiled using WinAVR free GCC GNU-C. He uses a PlayStation controller to help debug the walk cycles, and change parameters as needed. Watch a video after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
We don’t know whether to be horrified, or elated at the sight of this dancing hexapod. Yeah, it isn’t a hack. It isn’t even a build article. But if there is ever a time to post a six legged dancing head with glowing red eyes, it is today, Halloween. Enjoy.
