SickSack: ATMega Servo Snake Robot

[Lars] sent in this sweet snake robot that he and [Aske] built for the DTU Robocup. I’ve seen snake bots before, but I like the concept and the clean electronic design. They used a single AtMega32 controller to generate PWM signals for each of the eight servos, and used a very interesting DC-DC buck converter that’s capable of delivering 16 amps.

For the curious, the bot won the best design and effects award at the competition.

14 thoughts on “SickSack: ATMega Servo Snake Robot

  1. WOW! Very impressive. Elegant – Using a snaking motion to move forward, with passive wheels. The code must have been interesting! A bit like trying to emulate natures’ design. I wonder how efficient this is compared to using motor-driven wheels.

  2. I was just thinking, why doesn’t anyone ever create these things to be daisychainable, it’d be pretty easy to either run all links on one addressed data line, with cheap slaves on each link generating the servo pulses, or better yet, having the links pass possition data down the line from one to another through discrete connections. you gotta admit, it’d be cool to be able to just snap on additional vertibre.

  3. Well deserving best design and effects award :)
    Of the two robots that caught my attention the most down there was this snake-bot and “Tumlingen” an inverse pendulum design that actually managed to complete the whole course including going up and down slopes.

    Btw, better luck next time with the slopes lars and aske :)
    Best regards, Aleksander Toppe

  4. Hey Lars
    I just think’d that the winners of RoboCup’07 (RoseBot) also should say some :D
    Very nice and interesting design for the robot, I must say and wauw! The things you guys managed to make with your software over the last night was awesome !!!

    Best regards Bjørn Smith

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