Gain control over your legs movements!

If you are building a walking Robot, you will pull out your hair when trying to optimize the leg's movements.

I had this idea; I had a digital camera, I strapped on a LED with a rubber band to the tip of the foot, made the robot do the walking-movement I thought was right, while long-time-exposing it with the camera!

Resoult; Yellow stribes showed the path. I could now much, much cleareer get a picture of weather the foot was actually lifting up before moving back etc etc.

Really fast and effective :) Also one can see where the foot is stopping (the LED is showing in full), and if you let the Microcontroller turn on and off (perhaps a second) LED, you can match this with the code you upload, and this way tune in to the rigth moves.

I did a similar thing when i

I did a similar thing when i tested the legs for my hexapod - i attached a pen to it. I never thought about this method and it probably works a lot better (you need to have a bit pressure to the paper with the pen, which affects the movements a bit).

Thanks, i may as well use it sometime!

BTW, is that supposed to be a triangle? :stuck_out_tongue: It looked similarily skew with squares for me.

BTW, is that supposed to be a triangle?

What is to be a triangle?

If you are thinking about the shape the Yellow LED makes, no :slight_smile:

This was a walker on four legs (one of the hardest to do, always balance on 2 legs while moving 2 other) - And it shows how a leg is moved down, back, swept up while the other 2 legs go down … forward without touching ground… and again :slight_smile:

I may actually have a video of that walker somewhere, I had forgot… Hmm other computer, maby later…

/ Frits

Too cool!
This is a great idea of debugging legs, awesome! Thanks Fritsl

Found the old video:

Found the old video: https://www.robotshop.com/letsmakerobots/node/2497

Still I know there is a better video of it somewhere, one where it shows that it actually could walk pretty well… Will find it one day :slight_smile:

I used this technique some time ago!

here