MakerBot Industries

RoboSpider

I’ve been thinking for a while now about how I could make a walking toy insect that would be powered by just one little motor.  No fancy electronics, just one motor, turning in one direction at a constant speed – making a little robot walk.  I’d really rather it ran off of a rubber band or a spring, but baby¹ steps.

I really like the existing walking robot projects out there.  The DogBot and the ModHex are very cool, but they seem to require a pile of servos each.  Up until very recently, I didn’t have a good idea of how I could make something that could walk without the use of a very complicated Theo Jansen style walker.  While tinkering with idea based on arkatipe’s bugbot, I started searching for videos of insects walking and eventually found a video of a real spider walking and an animated spider walking.

I’ve included a little sketch of how I generally conceive of the idea as working.  Two smaller gears on the left and right of a larger gear, which makes the two outer gears turn in the same direction and speed.  There’s a bar that attaches to each of the outside gears and will rotate in a very wide elliptical fashion.  A set of four of these could possibly be run off of a single worm gear.  Half of the assemblies would be set to be on the downward rotation as the other half are rotating upwards. ²

Let me know what you think of this project.  I’ve uploaded my design files along with some other notes to Thingiverse.  Would you be interested in hearing about my OpenSCAD designs?  Do you want to know what additional OpenSCAD design tricks I used that are not in my series of OpenSCAD tutorials?  Do you want to about the print results from the first draft?  Do you have some suggestions?

1. spider [↩]
2. Although, you could probably  have this work with only two moving assemblies and two stationary ones rotating around. [↩]

Doesn’t that look like fun?!  The Fabricate Yourself project used a Kinect to capture 3D images of attendees that were then converted to STL’s on dovetail joint blocks and then 3D printed at the TEI 2011 conference!¹

Fabricate Yourself is a project that documented the Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction Conference. Usually we think of documentation in terms of text, photography and video, but given the tangible theme of the conference we decided to engage the community by capturing and fabricating small 3D models of attendees. This enabled us to build a tangible model of the event and fabricate it piece by piece during the conference.

I could totally imagine a future with 3D photo booths that print out a printed plastic block with a 3D rendering of the booth’s occupants.  Or what about a souvenir from your favorite theme park – you could get a printed model of yourself cringing in the seat of a roller coaster instead of just a picture!

1. Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction [↩]