Final Report: Arachnae II

The main purpose of this project was to build a six-legged walking robot which behaves like an insect. This includes the following tasks :

• Designing and building the mechanical and mobile platform
• Designing and building digital and analogous circuitry to control motors and sensory
• Writing code for the distributed controller network
• Writing code to incorporate walking and behavioral algorithms

Six legs were chosen because of its stability on different gaits. Each leg has 3 degrees of freedom for higher maneuverability and more and better possible movements. Each leg has its own controller, which is actually a considerable amount of hardware but makes the system more flexible. At the time of this writing the robot has the ability to walk forward and backward and to turn to the left or right, depending on a collision detection with its whiskers. Other behaviors, much more sophisticated sensory and the ability for generating topological maps for navigation and path planning is left over for the second part of the practical course.

Last updated: 26.6.1999