Final Report: Arachnae II

Summary

Arachnae II was demonstrated on June 6, 1999. It successfully executed a six-legged walking gait with obstacle detection at the institute of knowledge based systems at the technical university of vienna.
Though not all of the fixed goals were met, most of the planned subsystems were implemented. The most critical factors in finishing the project were time and cost constraints. Having to keep things as cheap and small as possible led us to the use of standard rc servo motors and ready-to-use microcontrollers with built-in basic interpreter. A few words about the Basic Stamp family of controllers from ParallaxBased: though they are really easy to use and small and powerful and .. they are not really suitable for such a complex system like a walking robot. Too slow for controlling a few servos and handling external events in an environment with those hard runtime constraints they are, without any doubt, especially suitable for reading slow sensors. On the other hand their main advantages are the quick results when programmed in their simple PBasic language without the need of special programming devices.

The design of the control system itself was found to be working and serviceable. Using faster controllers or/and assembler or c programming plus implementing a high speed serial communication system may increase the computational power and data transfer rate of the whole network.

Future Work

The mechanics and kinematics will not be changed though there are a lot of improvements waiting for realization. In the immediate future, we concentrate our energies on the improvement and increase of efficiency of the control system, that is, to implement a navigation and path planning system (running externally on a pc) combined with a sonar subsystem, an infrared range detector and some sort of additional sensory.

Well .. now we have all the necessary know-how to build this one next .. proposed project name: Mss. Data

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Last updated: 26.6.1999