Six-Legged Mechanical Walkers: Spring 2020 Highlights
The leg mechanisms of these six-legged walkers use two coordinated function generators to drive the hip and knee joints to achieve the desired foot trajectory. This differs from Jansen’s leg mechanism in the following ways: (i) separate cranks can be used to drive the hip and knee joints, rather than the same crank driving both joints; (ii) the drive of the hip joint need not be connected at the knee but can connect any where on the upper leg; and (iii) a true parallelogram is used to connect the drive around the hip down to the knee, whereas Jansen’s connection has one side slightly larger for both pairs (39.3, and 39.4 for one pair of sides, and 40.1 and 36.7 for the other pair). So these leg mechanisms can be viewed as generalizations of Jansen’s design.
Stable gait for these walkers can be achieved by coordinating three legs at a time to form a tripod gait. Please see this video showing walkers designed by my students to be a crocodile, rhinoceros, bug, legged container and the Star Wars All-Terrain Tactical Enforcer, known as AT-TE. These assemblies of six 10-bar linkages connected by a gear train of as many as 18 gears posed a challenge to SolidWorks motion analysis for my students. We will get better at this.
