Hexapod
Houston ...
Since my last post, I’ve been dipping in and out of the Antdroid software for this project and it’s now time for an update. Shortly before Christmas, I hit a bug which prevented me from uploading the firmware to the Arduino which one of the project devs helped me to work around. Since then I’ve run into all sorts of annoying roadblocks ranging from permissions issues to inadequate documentation and, after some consideration, I made the decision to put the Antdroid code aside for now in an effort to get the robot moving under its own steam.
To do this, I threw a really simple Arduino sketch together to receive servo angle data over serial from my laptop. This quickly revealed a major issue: the legs aren’t strong enough to hold the robot’s weight and they buckle when moving, as can be seen from this short video:
I obviously need to work on improving the strength of the legs before I can proceed with anything else on this project. Then I’ll need to figure out what I’m going to do about the software.
All of this takes me away from my original goal of using this robot to get familiar with ROS. So, while I will be working on strengthening the legs, I’ll probably switch my focus back onto building a 2-wheel robot for a while (although that project will also be getting a bit of a rethink).
Posted on 02 February 2017
