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. [↩]

WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK.

The only reason for this post is to kick the crawling nightmare that is the ModHex brainchild of moleofproduction off the front page.  The only way I could put it into the website was to include a quick hack which made it autoplay the sound that will accompany the apocalypse.