The Walking Robot History
I became facinated witht the concept of a walking vehicles because of the mechanical challenges of making a machine to move like a living creature.
My first walking creation was built in 1994 out of legos.
It worked on a principle of linking a two bar mechanism (connected to the main body via a pivot) to a rotating wheel with a off-centered cam pivot (shown in the picture to the right). It had six legs with two pairs of three opperating in phase and 180 degrees out of phase with the adjacent pair of three legs. It steered by a pivot located in the center of the body, powered by a Lego neumatic system. The wheels at the end of the legs were locked, and were only used for traction and their round contour.
The problems with this walking mechanism was that as the weight bearing pair of legs started to complete their eliptical travel back upwards, relative to the body of the robot, the newly placed pair of weight bearing legs had to lift the robot 1/2 its overall step height. This led to unnessary power losses in lowering and raising the body of the robot. In addition, the mechanism was unable to handle any terrain contours. This resulted in the entire walking mechanism being simply a lousy replacement for a wheel-driven mechanism.
From this point I worked on creating a more effecient, terain friendly walking mechanism that opperated effeciently and effectively.