Description

Crawler that resembles a bug of some kind. Spent a lot of time trying to perfect the movement, I experimented with different kinds of legs and feet, different wheels and different angles of the body. Certain setups performed better on hardwood floors than carpet and vice versa.

Components 

• Arduino board 
• Breadboard
• wiring
• potentiometer
• servo motor
• 2 metal rods (legs)
• empty tissue paper roll
• lots of tape 

Arduino Code 

/* * Servo with Potentiometer control * Theory and Practice of Tangible User Interfaces * October 11 2007 */int servoPin = 7;      // Control pin for servo motorint potPin   = 0;      // select the input pin for the potentiometerint pulseWidth = 0;    // Amount to pulse the servolong lastPulse = 0;    // the time in millisecs of the last pulseint refreshTime = 20;  // the time in millisecs needed in between pulsesint val;               // variable used to store data from potentiometerint minPulse = 500;   // minimum pulse widthvoid setup() {  pinMode(servoPin, OUTPUT);  // Set servo pin as an output pin  pulseWidth = minPulse;      // Set the motor position to the minimum  Serial.begin(9600);         // connect to the serial port  Serial.println("servo_serial_better ready");}void loop() {  val = analogRead(potPin);    // read the value from the sensor, between 0 - 1024    if (val > 0 && val <= 999 ) {    pulseWidth = val*2 + minPulse;  // convert angle to microseconds        Serial.print("moving servo to ");    Serial.println(pulseWidth,DEC);    }  updateServo();   // update servo position}// called every loop(). void updateServo() {  // pulse the servo again if rhe refresh time (20 ms) have passed:  if (millis() - lastPulse >= refreshTime) {    digitalWrite(servoPin, HIGH);   // Turn the motor on    delayMicroseconds(pulseWidth);  // Length of the pulse sets the motor position    digitalWrite(servoPin, LOW);    // Turn the motor off    lastPulse = millis();           // save the time of the last pulse  }}

 Images 

crawler

Video 

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ethan/crawler.avi