Tag Archives: gallery

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

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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~~