Final Report: Arachnae II

Why a Walking Robot ?

The most important reason to build a walking robot is its improved maneuverabilty compared to wheeled ones: Walking machines are normally able to explore and traverse difficult and rough terrain inaccessible to those with wheels or caterpillar tracks. Other good reason are (especially for people like us studying computer science where you never see things moving around except other wacky students and illumined academic staff) the challenge to design and build a mechanical something and see the machine doing something more or less useful under computer control. While a wheeled robot seems to be too easy (isn't it?) and a millepede to expensive to construct a six-legged walker is a good compromise. Finally there's enough to do for those which can't live without their daily programming session.

Legs of Walking Robots

Leg design on the one hand is an interesting challenge on its own for a mechanical engineer while on the other hand the control of a multi-legged machine may be a thrilling job even for an ingenious software engineer.
Arachnae II is a six-legged walker where all six legs are of the same shape. Each are controlled by their own microcomputer system which are supervised themselves by another controller.

What we did

For this practical course, our goal was to design and build a six-legged, walking and autonomous agent, exhibiting insect-line behaviors. A second objective was to implement fundamental gaits and finally to enable the robot to react to some basic external stimuli like obstacles and ambient temperature and light.
The scope of the project included building the mobile platform, bulding the controlling hardware, sensing devices and last not least writing code to obtain actuation of the servos and implementation of some fundamental behaviors.

Last updated: 26.6.1999