Our robot was one of a few featured on the discovery channel on a program called World of Wonder, narrated by Michael Dorn. I've extracted two clips from that show below that show some of the mechanism in motion.
...Video Clips...
MPEG (815K-Bytes) This clip is from near floor level looking up into the the robot's front right legs as it walks towards the camera.
| MPEG (531K-Bytes) In this video clip the entire robot can be seen walking away from the camera. The "driver" in the back is holding the control box with a remote "kill" switch.
| MPEG (~43Meg-Bytes) This segment has the entire section of the show. It's really large and not recomended for dialup. You will need the newest version of the viewer to see it. There are about 10 clips of our robot here.
| | If you've got a slow connection, go ahead and let it start playing. Then let it sit for a while (several minutes). Finally, click rewind and then play again and it should paly through smoothly.
| |
Duing the 94'-95' School year, I was involved heavily with the WSU Robotics Group.
We designed and built a walking robot, Henry the VIII to compete in the ASAE (American Society of Automotive Engineers)
International Walking Machines Decathalon. Pictured to the right with Henry are (from left to right) Rick Lambey, James Boer, Josh Meyers, Kenneth Maxon & Mike Vinje.
One begins to appreciate the magnitude of the project when reviewing
Henry's system metrics as follows:
| Factor
| Measurement
|
| Dimensions
| Height: 3ft Length: 6ft Width: 3ft
|
| Weight
| Aprox 280lbs
|
| Power Factor
| Twenty-four volt power system capable of sourcing upwards of sixty amperes continous
|
| Construction
| Welded steel frame with 1/2" & 1/4" Water Jet and CNC machined leggs and gear armatures
|
| Payload
| Two full grown college students (180lb ea)
|
My involvement in the group as a driving force in the
overall design of the machine, although credit for the ingenious mechanical design rests souly on Josh Meyer
who deserves quite a bit of credit. I found myself directly involved in many aspects, investing considerable
time teaching group members to operate milling equipment and providing all CNC related production.
I was responsible for the entire electronics design of Henry the VIII including construction and interface
of the digital processor system and embeded processor programming to boot. The initial plan had been to use a laptop to corrdinate all motion, however we ended up corrdinating all motion through dedicated hardware control interfaces and using the laptop as a navigation storage platform.
Final guidance software took place
via an onboard 486 system tied directly to my hardware processor controll system and was written interactively
by both Rick Lambey and Myself at Colorado State University just two nights before the competition.
One of the really cool parts of this project is in that of the mechanical design of the robot leg. I'm extremely impressed with the design the group came up with. Below is a pictorial essay of the leg motion development extracted from the paper we presented at the competition:
If you'd like to read the entire report, click on the link, right:
The part show (below) is one of the planetary thigh joints. the 1.125" diameter berrings pressed into oposite ends support two large planetary gears used to transimit 3/4HP. Note the 1/2" thick aluminum construction and water jet profile cutting with CNC machine finishing. The third CAD outline shows the lightning hole pattern used on the upper leg sections. There are sixteen of these 2ft long piecs on Henry.
Yes, back "in the day", I used to lay out boards by hand. That way I could generate a DXF file from them and use the software I wrote for the CNC ploting machine that I built to plot them directly onto the bare copper boards. The traces are on 0.050" centers to ease the constraints on "mushy" pen tips.
In this next frame, the second board that stacks below the processor board show above. Note the right angle 50 pin connector in the low right corner of the board. This provides the connection between the two boards. It used a 50 pin ribbon cable with IDC connectors.
The third board, shown below, depicts the high current MOSFET interface board. Again, the common interface connector is in the lower right of the board. It's a good thing we didn't build this board and opted to use comercial motor controllers instead. At least I had a line of opto's as first defense. The bad news is the power supplies shared a common return. We ended up using comercial speed controlers interfaced to the two boards above. The power traces are run in triplicate and the system is designed for on/off control only.
Boy, the technology I use these days has progressed a long way past this.
The sad truth of the matter is that today Henry sits in a basement lab at WSU unloved and partially dissasembled. He sits on a roll around cart so that he can easily be moved out of the way so the space can be used for other projects. :(
Following is a 3-D CAD rendering of the robot I created
while a member of WSU Robotics over Christmas break 95.
Over the 96-97-98 school year, they actually plan to build this robot.
The design was intended to be used for solid modeling and animation as well as a
group logo! Even though they plan to use many commercially available motion controll
products, it will be interesting to see how they tie it all together. Good luck guys, (Mike
, Josh, Mark, Rick, Scott,
John, & the rest of the gang), because this task will require a lot of work!
Needless to say, this was a team effort, and credit goes where credit is due, of considerable note on the project are
Mike Vinje (project manager and motivator),
Scott Crawford (Awsome get the job done sort of guy),
John Axtel (Another hardworking willing to donate time dude),
Rick Lambey (I have too much to do, so I can realistically donate 30+ hours a week),
and Josh Meyer (Great designs but I'm glad you switched to EE, keep it up!).
I hope that the WSU Robotics Group continues to be the hard-core fun learning expierence we created.
