Monica's Icosatetraped

I am an Artificial Intelligence researcher and CEO of Syntience Inc. ( http://syntience.com ). Robots are just a hobby. Watch videos about AI at http://videos.syntience.com and read http://artificial-intuition.com or my blog at http://monicasmind.com .

In 2005, I built a robot with 24 soft pneumatic legs controlled by a Mac Mini. See the robot walk and watch a slideshow of how I built it. It took about 5 weekends. The robot got two first prizes (best demo and best presentation) at Hackers' Conference in 2005.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• robot
• science
• hobby
• makezine
• build
• pneumatics
• hardware
• hack
• project
• artificial intelligence
• monica anderson
• syntience
• ai

[notgud20]

I have few questions to you:

1) Couldnt you have reduced the number of solenoids and form a different gait mechanism this is to reduce the whole weight of the robot. ??

2) In what way did you calculate how much of air pressure is required for your robot.

3) Why were you using such big compressor's??

Well I am askng this because of I was designing my robot underwater using softer legs which would use suction mechanism to stick to the ground and move forward. And your idea stuck to me.

[notgud20]

But was not able to understand how to implement it. Thanks for the whole video I did understand it clearly. But I need to design in such way as to reduce the number of solenoids and the whole electronics part. But seriously great. Hats off to you.

Thank you once again and looking forward for the answers.

[syntience]

Electronics is cheap; This was a research experiment to determine if soft legs would work at all. I would have used something like an Arduino if I was doing it for real.

It's the energy for the compressors that dictates the design and this is hard to get around, although fewer legs, light legs, and a lighter bot overall all contribute to a lower energy optimum total mass balance.

Battlebots often use bottled pressurized nitrogen as energy source but it's relatively expensive.

[syntience]

Three-stroke motion appealed to me. It went with the three tubes per leg theme. Because of the three-stroke, this one would require the band to play a Mazurka if it was to parade.

Atmospheric pressure is about 14.7 PSI. Vacuum doesn't get better than that. For balance, I decided to aim for 10 PSI either way.

I needed rotary vane type for continuous flow. And the flow can be computed from the deltas of the leg volumes. And I needed DC operation. And I wanted the 10 PSI.

[zahraj]

Nice piece of work.

[evolutionsdisaster]

Superb, great, amazing

I liked the explnation of it more, obv icosotetraped is more amazing.

[1888junkteam]

excellent work!

[1888junkteam]

excellent work!

[hamimannn]

nicely done great job

do have a look at this as well POPPING AND LOCKING DESI STYLE

pretty cool and entertaining

c the whole thing for real fun....

[TheNewVideos]

You are right about that!

Keep up the good work!

What the next step on with this robot? Any tasks planed?