Walking Robot- Week 2

We decided that we would work on the "box ski dude" idea instead of the "frogbot" because we didn't really think the elastic concept would work properly. We also were more interested in a motion that was most similar to walking.

Like we previously found out, we had to make a couple important adjustments to our original design. 1. We had to put the legs off center from the gear and we had to add extra legs to keep the robot balanced.

We were inspired by a lego robot that was in the engineering room. It has a motor rotating an axle with two small gears attached. These small gears rotate a four larger gears where the legs are attached. The legs are similar to our design because, they are not individual legs, but skids. Another important aspect of this lego robot that is the hidden skids that keep the robot balanced.

Here is the picture of the lego robot:

And this is a picture of skids that keep the robot in balance:

We decided to incorporate this by having two front "legs" extend from the front of the robot. They would look like large teeth, making the robot look more like a walrus. But this would be a creative solution to issue of balance.

Another issue that we came up with was whether we wanted to make gears on SolidWorks or to find another way to create the same motion without gears. The problem with plastic gears is that they don't work properly. So it would be better to figure out a way just to make circles that would rotate simultaneously. In order to come up with a solution we played with legos and Professor Turbak helped us. This was very tricky because when we attached a bar to two circle and rotated one circle, the bar did not follow a constant rotating motion because it would often rotate the other way. This occurred because the motion wasn't constrained enough. We found, however, that if you attached another set of circle pieces with a bar connecting them to the original circles, giving you a total of four circles, the motion was constrained and the bars followed a circular motion. However, there was one condition: the bars had to be less than 180 degrees out of phase. So we made the separation between the bars as close as possible to 180 degrees. Hopefully that would be enough to imitate the act of walking. Here is a picture of the lego motion module that we will base our robot on: