Me and my friend @Smoke_Jonas are building a 6-legged (hexapod) robot. The current focus is on stable motions and movement control. Future plans include expanding it into a fully functional home assistant with perception, interaction, and smart home integration.
I have reached a few goals and managed to complete a few challenges that I was afraid of. There are actually two important steps I have completed.
First, I managed to finish the raw Hexapod build (a few electronic parts are still missing, but I mean the body).
Secondly, I made a few improvements to control a Hexapod leg with coordinates (we also had a problem with our C++ header files that my friend has, thank goodness, solved). So now we are really able to control a real leg with coordinates.
Another big feature where I laid my focus was a first movement test. I already implemented this feature. I tried to program the tripod gait. I hope that it’ll work, because I wasn’t able to test it until now like I mentioned above, I hadn’t had the time to include some electronic parts in the Hexapod build.
I suppose my next big step will be to actually get the robot to walk, so that my friend can finish his important tests and start to implement other movement features, because he is already really hyped for that. We’ll maybe also start with some kind of a control system, but I think that this will take us a little more time and it will be a while yet before we actually get started with that.
Since my last devlog, I’ve made great progress. I’ve been looking into inverse kinematics quite a bit and I was pretty successful. I managed to derive formulas for my calculations with a few drawings. I also started to build my robot. Actually, I’ve managed to build up one leg. The leg consists of three joints, each controlled by a servo motor.
Furthermore, my last step was to put my equations into code, so I wrote a test program. Now I am able to convert the angles into coordinates and I can move the leg with coordinates wherever I want.
The biggest challenge so far has been getting the math right for the inverse kinematics, but once I drew the leg and did my calculations on paper, everything came together pretty quickly.
My next actions would be to make some movement tests. I will try to make a first walking test and see how stable the leg performs. After that, the plan is to build the remaining legs and work on coordinating them together.
I started the Hexapod project by creating a project file structure and tried to implement the first functions for a leg of the Hexapod. It’s a bit difficult right now, because I am still waiting for my project hardware to arrive. So because I couldn’t really start to build the robot, and it was also difficult to start programming it, I started with a few servo tests with buttons and a potentiometer so that I would at least do something to better understand how servo engines work. My next step (when my hardware has arrived) would be to build the robot or at least a leg and try to figure out the kinematics and movement of it and implement it.
