Hexapod Robot Kinematics - part 5 (massive update and demo)
My hexapod simulator is slowly evolving into something more like hexapod design studio.
It now supports an arbitary number of legs and three different gait patterns. The legs no longer have to be anchored symmetrically around the robot body, but can have individual
offsets and orientation. The length of the coxa, femur and tibia segments can now vary between legs, enabling more interesting creatures.
In addition to streaming, I have also added support for motion primitives that can be recorded in the simulator and then be stored on
an embedded filesystem and triggered by the microcontroller (via remote control or from sensor input)
At this point it is now possible to build and operate a hexapod like robot of any shape and size without having to deal with inverse or forward kinematics.
All you need to input are the coordinates for the coxa joints and their orientation, the length of the segments for each leg and the "rest" angles where the robot is in a neutral syanding position.
On the microcontroller side it is only necessary to know how to open a file on the file system, read it and then send the information about the servo angles to your servo controller code.
To sum up: This enables (almost) no-code hexapod building. Which is kinda nice. This stuff used to be hard :)
In the previous video, the hexapod was moving about somewhat erratically and the motion seemed a bit off. After having uploaded the video, I discovered
that I accidentally had assembled the coxa servos upside down :)
Contents of this video --
00:00 - Intro.
00:08 - New simulation features
03:27 - Customizing individual segments and angles
08:34 - Basic hexapod
09:46 - Eight legged spider
12:18 - Why motion primitives ?
12:51 - Bot throws a tantrum
13:18 - Dancing shoes
13:51 - Cutting the umbillical cord
14:28 - Battery powah!
14:43 - Mr Bot steps out
15:52 - Next steps