2DOF Quad

Last weekend was the Kansas City Maker Fair where there was a pretty big robotics display, which included a Mech Warfare arena called "Atlantean Robotica". The arena was very well done, with a Jungle theme. Immortal managed to take home the gold, although its performance degraded during the competition because the servo gears on the femur joint are starting to fail due to the weight of the robot. In order to combat this for next year, I have decided to retire Immortal and rebuild a new quad for next years mech warfare.


The new design will utilize a very robust 2dof leg setup and inverse kinematics. The leg geometry allows the robot to stand straight without any load on the motors, making it very efficient relative to Immortals 4dof design. The main disadvantage of 2dof compared to 3dof is that depending on how you walk, either the feet need to slip or the body will bounce up and down. This can be minimized with longer coxa and femur lengths, although with reduced mechanical advantage. Below is a video of the proof of concept prototype i made. It has the capability of walking at about 250mm/s with fairly good stability:






Videos from the maker fair Mech Warfare competition can be seen here:
http://mike-ibioloid.blogspot.com/2011/06/atlantean-robotica-videos-from-kc-maker.html