The Pololu 3 Servo Hexapod

January 18, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 14 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqI-sDJTyuo&w=470]

Here’s a great tutorial on how to make a tiny hexapod walker. While this was written specifically for a kit that is sold by pololu, we like the simple layout. You could implement your own electronics if you prefer something else. If you want to follow along with their components, you’ll end up with a fairly small and decently agile hexapod. Sure the legs aren’t articulated at every joint, but the effect is workable. This is probably the first 3 servo walking hexapod we’ve encountered and we’ve seen a pretty decent amount of hexapods.

[Via HackedGadgets]

CES: Meet The Mini Hexapodinno

January 8, 2010 by Nick Caiello 5 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glNS81Kgk7g]
While we were browsing around the show floor, we saw a pretty cool little robot called the Mini Hexapodinno. As the name suggests, it’s a hexapod robot that utilizes sonar and can be programmed using BASIC. Although its not as cool as some of the other robots that we’ve seen, we still have a special place in our hearts for hexapods.

DASH: Clever Construction And Resilience In Robotics

October 14, 2009 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsTKAtBBkfU]

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. Continue reading “DASH: Clever Construction And Resilience In Robotics” →

Folding Hexapod Bodies

May 21, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

SideBySide (Custom)

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.

[thanks Thuli]

Fast Little Hexapods

April 20, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 19 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC4vWKenA7Y]

We’ve posted many many times about 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”.

[via BotJunkie]

A-pod

April 7, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 39 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jyBiECoS3Q]

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.

Wiimote Controlled Hexapods

April 5, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 8 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBj7koZ9lk]

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.

Continue reading “Wiimote Controlled Hexapods” →