ROBOTIC CRAB

I was intrigued by replicating animal walking gaits in robots and was thus given the project to make a arduino-ROS learning platform based on a bio-inspired robot as an internship project.
Developed for: Aliyance Mechatronics LLC

PROCESS

The project started with a base design available on Thingiverse which was modified a number of times to achieve better aesthetics, stability, and suitability as a learning kit. The entire mechanical assembly was 3D printed on PLA.

Milestone 1:

The crab used 18 microservos and was not able to stand properly because of low torque. In order to tackle the problem I chose to replace microservos in the femur section of the leg with metal gear Servos which could deliver much higher torque.

IMG_20170717_135631373_BURST001_edited.j

Milestone 2:

The first test after changing the mechanical assembly for servos was followed by a series of exploding voltage regulators. I figured out a way to increase the current delivering capacity of LM7805's using diodes and capacitors.

Milestone 3:

Controlling 12 micro servos and 6 servos at the same time with a single microcontroller for coding the tripod gate. I used I2C protocol for achieving master-multi slave communication.