Brandon Tsuge describes how to assemble the controller for two motors to drive the right and left sides of a walking machine using an RC transmitter and controller. See The Bored Robot: Using a DC Brushed Motor with a Rotary Encoder.
Kevin Chen, J. Michael McCarthy, Shaun Bentley
The design and assembly of our four-legged mechanical walkers can yield single degree-of-freedom systems with so many redundant mates that it stalls SolidWorks’ Motion Analysis. For example, the walker shown in Figure 1 had 782 redundant mates. The procedure outlined below reduced the number of redundant mates to 114, and Motion Analysis executed efficiently.
Our walker consists of a body, drive train, and four legs. The legs mechanisms are identical but assembled as front-to-back mirror images. The component parts of this walker mates were assembled using mates to align and coordinate various subassemblies, resulting in a large number of redundant mates.
In order to reduce the number of redundant mates, we dissolve the subassemblies, combine rigid elements, and mate new subassemblies as follows.
Dissolve all of the subassemblies in the walker. To do this, hover over each assembly and select the menu item Dissolve Assembly. See Figure 1.
Form new subassemblies for each leg, the drive train, and the body. See Figure 2. To do this, first, hover over the part, press “tab” to hide the part in order to identify it easily; and then, select all of the hidden parts, and right-click to open menu and select Form New Subassembly.
Within each new subassembly combine parts that do not move relative to each other. See Figure 3. The tree structure should consist of separate assemblies of rigid elements with the remaining mates between the assemblies. See Figure 4.
Repeat Step 3 for all of the new subassemblies. The result is shown in Figure 5.
Delete the mates in the main assembly. Introduce the mates required for movement using hinge mates, rather than coincident or concentric mates, where possible.
Make the subassemblies at the top-level flexible. Right-click on the assembly and select the flexible assembly icon .
The result of this procedure is a system with 114 redundant mates that Motion Analysis can process effectively. The result is that animation shown below.
While isolated to slow infections of the Coronavirus, over 60 UCI students learned how to apply the principles of Curvature Theory and Finite-Position Synthesis to the design leg mechanisms for mechanical walkers.
Their first team project was a four-legged walker that used the coupler curve of a four-bar linkage positioned using a skew-pantograph as the foot trajectory. Here are videos that show animations of their walkers
This is the first video:
And this is the second:
The final team project used finite-position synthesis to design function generators to drive the hip and knee joints and guide the foot trajectory. This mechanism is a generalization of the Jansen leg mechanism. Teams of three students designed the leg mechanism, the drive system and assembled them into a six-legged walker. Here are the videos of these walkers.
This is the first video:
And this is the second video:
The variety of these walkers show the versatility of the kinematic synthesis procedures, as well as the creativity of the students. It was a pleasure working with the students on these projects even with the challenges of remote instruction.
Here are videos of the designs for the four legged mechanical walkers obtained by Teams 2, 4 an 5. This is the final project in my Fall 2019 Kinematic Synthesis course.
Here are videos of the designs for the four legged mechanical walkers obtained by Teams 1, 3 an 6. This is the final project in my Fall 2019 Kinematic Synthesis course.
Here are the solid models of some of the walkers designed by UC Irvine students in my Spring 2019 course MAE 183 Kinematic Synthesis of Mechanisms.
Walker Group 1
Walker Group 2
Walker Group 4
Walker Group 6
Walker Group 8
Walker Group 9
Walker Group 10
This is a series of four videos that show how to:
Part 1:4 Setting up the design
Part 2:4 Synthesis of the hip function generator.
Part 3:4 Synthesis of the knee function generator.
Part 4:4 Assembly of the leg mechanism, exploration of design variations, and an example final leg design.
Prof Haijun Su at Ohio State University had his students design walking machines for their final project in ME 5751. Here are videos of four project teams from that event.
Team A:
Team B:
Team C:
Team D:
The linkage design software developed by Art Erdman and his students at the University of Minnesota, called LINCAGES: Linkage INteractive Computer Analysis and Graphically Enhanced Synthesis Package, was developed in 1977 through 2000. This is a link to his information site. His guide map that evaluates all of the linkages formed from points on the circle-point and counter-point curves was a nice innovation.
This link connects to a YouTube video shows the linkage design process using LINCAGES:
Just after I published my book Kinematic Synthesis of Mechanisms with its emphasis on leg mechanisms, I found two more interesting eight-bar legs from the designers at DIYWalkers.com
This is a Geogebra animation of the leg mechanism for the Strider walker. It is a symmetrical design that allows the formation of a second foot assembly by simply adding two more bars.
This is an animation of the leg mechanism in the TrotBot walker.
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