Hi All,
Before i begin, all credit goes to Matt Denton for being such inspiration for this project by his contributions and sharing of his knowledge to the robotics community.
Well, this is my graduation project for a Mechatronics Engineering degree that i’ve been working on for a year now, the design was inspired by Matt’s hexapods. The hexapod is controlled at real-time by the PC with a C-Language locomotion engine based on the balance gesture which i programmed from the scratch. The directions is controlled by the keyboard until now. The step path is determined by a cubic spline with refresh rate of 50Hz.
The on-board servo controller is Lynxmotion’s SSC-32. All the servos are HS-475HB, running with 4 NiMH cells of 2300mAh. The robot weighs about 1.5Kg including the batteries.
Here is a video that shows the V-Hex’s wave gait:
youtube.com/watch?v=tVKAWylV8bE
I also implemented a technique that allows me to animate the hexapod on 3Ds Max and use the saved animation data to move the hexapod exactly as animated, the power of this technique is that i can control the hexapod at real-time then call any of the saved animations to start to mimic when i want, this allows me to control the direction of the hexapod easily until it faces for example a stair which i then can call a pre-saved “going upstairs” animation!
This video shows how i used the animation in 3Ds Max to make the Hexapod draw the logo of my college:
youtube.com/watch?v=oKoH4AACaDg
I’d like to have your feedback on it.
Kind Regards,
Mohamed El Samadony