Nearly a year on from first idea and I’ve finally got a real gait that works.
I’ve been trying to implement a Metachronal (Wave) gait from day one and always one or two factors have eluded me. Now I’ve managed to get them sorted.
A new femur design allows better range of leg movement and also looks better. I’ve adopted the name ‘Mantis’ for this incarnation as the new legs and the camera mount give it a look of a mantid.
Its still the same bot. Kondo servos, an SSC32 and a Sparkfun bluetooth with hand cut polycarbonate parts.
The engine is in VB.NET 2005 which gave me the bits I needed. An accurate millisecond clock allows me to use the same timings as the SSC32 so I know when a move will complete.
Each leg is coded as an object and runs its own I.K. in a seperate thread. This allows each leg to calculate its next position from the current position by passing X,Y and Z as coordinates. Once calculated each thread flags that it requires to move. The Comms manager is a seperate thread that detects when a leg requires movement and passes the instruction to the SSC to carry out the move.
The gait can be varied by delaying the passing of step tokens between the rear legs. A long delay causes 6 apparently discrete leg steps, a short one allows all legs to move within the token rules.
Control is from an Xbox360 controller. I’ve used the Gamepad component from the XNA studio to achieve this.
Video is either through Roborealm or VisionLab dependent upon what I want it to see.
Below is a Youtube video. Sorry about the quality. With clear lexan, no matter how I light the thing it blends into the floor colour. I’ve been trying to get Coloured or Black polycarbonate but there appears to be little call for it here in teh U.K.
