Hexapods

Summer: Rideable hexapod, check

teaser pic

Ah, where’ve I been all summer?

Having lots of fun, actually, but I’ve been hiding in my codefail cave and then I went and lost my camera.

Poof, hundreds of meticulous documentation pictures. Serves me right for not documenting as I go along / backing up my pictures.

Above is a pic of hexapod before I added the foot controls. Which are now being demoted in favor of joystick controls. But I did finish it in time for dorm rush / hall rush and gave lots of froshlings rides! And discovered some serious issues 🙂

Hexarideablepod is based off of a very detailed instructables called Hexabot. I’m slightly embarrassed by this fact, for whatever reason, and even though hexarideablepod only deserves my love (it already has my blood, sweat, and tears…)

Yea, that’s a racecar seat that my fellow MITERSians helped me recycle from an old unfinished vehicle 🙂

Hexapods

Strange and Beautiful Hexapods (Spider Robots), A Gallery

Hexahelicopter: ridiculousness.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wy0s0S8eZQ

Q: How many species of hexapods (six-legged robots) are there in the world? Oh, oh dear.
A: A mind-boggling awesomespectacular amount.

Here’s a compilation of some of the hexapod craziness out there. The sheer number of different hexapod designs out there is mind-blowing.

(p.s. for ideas of simple ways to build one, see my build post: http://www.orangenarwhals.com/?p=202)

Infinity Degrees-of-Freedom Style

To start off with, you guys have all watched the dancing hexapods, right?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msaWXY3OuQQ

Chopsticks (yes, the robot frame was made of snapped-in-half bamboo chopsticks o.o)

 http://letsmakerobots.com/node/26107

[update 8 dec 2011] Cheaply, out of wood:

http://forums.trossenrobotics.com/showthread.php?4102-Low-Cost-Hexapod

Ant-like A-Pod

http://forums.trossenrobotics.com/showthread.php?t=2762

Hexapod that learns to walk using machine-learning algorithms! shiny shiny, and good music too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3ovrT8pWww
http://hplusmagazine.com/2010/02/15/can-he-make-dancing-hexapod-robot-happy/

Tiny

http://www.custobots.com/products/pre-built-mini-hexapodinno-kc01001
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glNS81Kgk7g

Sexy

http://www.hexapodrobot.com/forum/viewtopic..php?f=5&t=389

Sheer Giant Awesomeness Style

Spider Tank (An entire series on Youtube!)

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/st_obsessed_robot/
The cute prototype: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6qpSOjtB2E

How it works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is7x_atNl94 (someone attempts to explain it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJjX_YbqTC4)

The series: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86Krv3gE-c4

Walking House-style (by MITERs alum Sam Kronick!) (yes, the scale of this is where humans fit inside easily)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkb6jfEwe0g
http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/WALKINGHOUSE/walkinghouse.html

Simple Linkage Style
General idea: Cant one side up and move legs forward.

3D printed

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5156

Rideable

http://www.instructables.com/id/Hexabot-Build-a-heavy-duty-six-legged-robot/

[update 8 dec 2011]
Look it’s bicycle powered

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJY1fqzuqL0

Tiny (Pololu)

Simple Hexapod Walker: http://www.pololu.com/docs/0J42
Knexapod

http://robotics.hobbizine.com/knexapod.html

Even simpler lego one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ9QOjx-7FQ

Boebots parallax:

Lego Pneumatics-style
Mondo Spider– Hydraulic, electric

Jensen / Klann Linkage style “hexapods”

(for a comparison of the linkages: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsRVu8BoSN4)

Uh… more like infinity legs. But same order of magnitude 🙂
Knex: http://robotics.hobbizine.com/knexabeast.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz4mflE2foM

Steam Powered! Wow.

http://www.crabfu.com/steamtoys/rc_steam_spider/ The Crabfu site has many other wonders as well.

And semi-relatedly, cute mini-windbeest. D’awww…

http://crabfuartworks.blogspot.com/2011/01/gakken-otona-no-kagaku-strandbeest.html

Holy cow that’s robots on speed. This just has to be watched, no image will do it justice:
Hyper fast robot line following  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XiRxNkZleY
(more closeups here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Soq9qpK5Ac)

[update 8 dec 2011]
Rideable
okay, not simple-linkage-style, but rideable! yay

http://www.orangenarwhals.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/uak5f.gif

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE9HqGas7FM&feature=fvst

Research Hexapods

(theses are an excellent source of juicy details!)
DASH Resilient High-Speed 16-gram Hexapedal Robot 
By “resilient”, they mean “let me drop this robot off a the roof of a ten-story building and have it walk away perfectly fine”…. o___O (28 meters, actually)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsTKAtBBkfU
Thesis: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~paulb/IROS09_DASH_submitted.pdf

Origami hexapod?

http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ronf/Prototype/index.html
Climbing robot, DIGbot (awesome site!): http://biorobots.case.edu/projects/climbing/digbot/

About halfway through this vid, it climbs up a tree trunk! http://biorobots.case.edu/projects/climbing/digbot/natural_1.wmv
The thesis: http://biorobots.case.edu/projects/climbing/digbot/thesis_Diller.pdf

Another climbing robot, RiSE:
http://kodlab.seas.upenn.edu/~rise/newsite/

Pneumaticals and FAST and cute -^-^- Stanford Sprawl and iSprawl: (esp. see 0:43 mark)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC4vWKenA7Y
The website: http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/biomimetics/ (click on “Robots”: http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/biomimetics/documents/sprawl/)
Thesis: http://bdml.stanford.edu/twiki/pub/Rise/IndependentSprawl/Kim_A038_CLAWAR04.pdf

Rhex, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhex, http://kodlab.seas.upenn.edu/RHex/Home

Stiquito,  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiquito, http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/1842/2574/1/Rosano%20PhD%20Thesis.pdf

Random thesis with a lot of theory and less building: http://poisson.me.dal.ca/~dp_08_02/Site/Documentation_files/Build_Report.pdf

Controls Thesis nom nom: http://www.sigada.org/ada_letters/march2002/thirion.pdf

MIT Leg Lab Controls thesis: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/leglab/robots/robots.html

(pdf at http://www.ihmc.us/users/jpratt/publications/jpratt_masters_thesis1995.pdf)

Thesis-y youtube vid, background on hexapods:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eunuHrTPS1o

Old-school 18 motor hexapod, back in the 1980s: Odex I

http://www.theoldrobots.com/odex.html
Schematic: http://www.genomicon.com/2009/09/the-functionoids-are-coming/

NASA GIANT hexapod, wheeled hybrid “ATHLETE”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwFrCpYavt4

What the…

Oh, and then you can use your robot as a platform and attach weird things to it. 😀
18 servo planter (Farmbot) — lynxmotion body

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACtihXjq2B0

18 servo CNC Hexapod Router

 Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quN37YskoaM
Construction details: http://www.hexapodrobot.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=12

Toys
ELEKIT MR-9722, aka Avoider III http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nc-viPoI1iY

Hexbugs, which seem like toy rip-offs of research robots / the internet (Jamie, of Spider Tank / Wired fame, was a bit upset about this):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexbug

And that’s all for today folks. Whew.
Hope that gives some inspiration for building hexapod / spider / legged / AWESOME robots 🙂

Appendix


Sellers: (product datasheets are an excellent source of information for advice on how to build your own)

Misc. Documentation:

My main aids in this search: (I mirrored the images, because I hate seeing beautiful image collections destroyed by dead links)

I mirrored the images here:
https://picasaweb.google.com/nancy.ouyang/StrangeAndBeautifulHexapodsMirroringImagesFromTheWeb

And, in closing, lego shrimp climbing! An entirely different way of solving “how to climb over obstacles.”
Lego Technic SHRIMP http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW4LJW6j05E

Puaghhhh. Who knew compiling images would eat 6 hours of my life???

====
edit 10/13/2010: more hexapods, don’t think they’re mobile but so pretty!

http://www.microbotic.org/singer.htm

=====
edit 17 dec 2011:

http://www.hizook.com/blog/2011/11/28/jambots-soft-robots-based-particle-jamming-hexapod-irobot
eeeee particle jamming hexapod! hehe. soft hexapod~~

Hexapods

hexapods / summer status update

hexapod: IK, preprogrammed dancing+lilypad controls ETA end of August (2 months, pure software development)
electronics working, now apply programming
(look at trossen robotics code, implement IK)
buy things: xbee tx and rx, two lilypads, some battery male plugs + femfem servo cables, maybe a sensor or two?, maybe a ps2 controller? or accel for lilypads?, el wire, [conductive thread]
vision: sound-reactive EL wire’d body, movements depend on real-time sound input processing. lilypad
buy them soon. spend money, you can do it. o__o
mechanical: upgrade to laserjet acrylic, 3d printed, or waterjet+Al body. Put HITECs on shoulders. double-sided support. (ETA New Year ish)

hexarideablepod: ETA end of July (1 month), ideally by next week…
order steel monday or tuesday
learn welding tuesday or wednesday
CAD slightly larger version, possibly with gearing to avoid undervolting and provide more torque/power. probs not for first version… check for bolts etc.

laser-cutter: ETA end of IAP (next January)
make spreadsheet of options and commercial cost
e.g.
bed size, laser wattage, commercial price & URL, laser commercial price & URL.
Then email out to MITERS.

direct-to-pcb/garment printing: requires just a weekend. maybe with Rush funding?

MITERS, lights automation and RFID keyholding, ETA last two weeks of August (begin after GSoC end).
*go ahead and order parts


Timeline:
hexarideablepod, until Monday July 11th (intense build during week off from CfA).

hexapod w/ IK and bluetooth, 2 weeks. w/ EL wire, 1 week. (aug 1st). w/ lilypad, 1 week (aug 8th).

Then 3 weeks left…
Plan A: MITERS personality core, 1 week, RFID keyholding, 1 weekend, rotary phone Putz, 1 week.
Plan B: make a scooter (hate walking). Last week = rush.
Plan C: start on hexaawesomepod

mysekritproject, 1 weekend sometime.

projects blog (nouyang)