Walking mechanisms

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joey_picus
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Walking mechanisms

Post by joey_picus »

Having found myself in posession of a 2mm thick plate of chequerplate aluminium and a robot's worth of spare bits, I've been considering doing a walker for the next AWS, really as much for the novelty and the technical challenge as for any extra weight or its combat capabilities (although having said that...Little Yellow Taxi's spinner gear has been freed up with that robot's demise, and I have various Dremel accessories and bits of Ti lying around, so if there's weight left you never know how it might turn out :P)

Walking mechanisms have been tricky to work out though, hence me posting this thread. I love the Type 0/Scuttle/Anarchy style approach but don't really have the technical ability to line up 14 or more gears and the attachments for them, and using Andy's 3d printed legs, although they're very cool, would feel slightly hollow for me personally (well, that and I'd need 4 motors for it to walk stably, and I only have two atm)

So what I've thought about doing is something like this Tamiya walker I saw:
Image

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa9Hd4LENKY

That seems to be within my somewhat limited technical skills, and the mechanism looks very simple to do, but I can't really work out the ratios of distances between pivot points/crank lengths/leg lengths required to get a smooth motion within the length I can reasonably go to, maths and physics not being my strong points :P

So I was wondering if anyone else had any experience with this or any other type of walking mechanism, and could offer advice of any sort for building such a beast?
Joey McConnell-Farber - Team Picus Telerobotics - http://picus.org.uk/ - @joey_picus
"These dreams go on when I close my eyes...every second of the night, I live another life"
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