"Walky Boi 2.0"
"Walky Boi 2.0" is an Arduino-based quadruped robot that I developed after "Walky Boi 1.0." Similarly to the original, the largest challenge for this project was figuring how four legged animals actually walked. This time, I turned to my dog, Kilani, for help. I recorded her walking across the room to try to get a better understanding of her gait, and compensated her with treats for her participation in the study.
After analyzing Kilani's gait, I started to get a better understanding of how four-legged animals walked. At first, I tried to brute force programming all of the legs of the robot individually. These attempts mostly led to moving forward slightly then unceremoniously flopping over. After researching a bit more, I came to the realization that each leg of a four legged animal basically follows the same path. Using this information, I programmed the motion of a single leg, and then applied that same motion to all of the other legs, with each leg just starting at a different point in the sequence(e.g. one leg would be in the part of the cycle where it lifts up and moves forward when another was moving back and pushing the bot forward).
Using the strategy above, I was able to get the bot to smoothly walk forward. For the fun of it, I also developed a start-up sequence.
