Assignment

Create a walker using a servo. Although I figured from the start that it would be difficult to achieve an effective walk cycle using a vertically oriented servo, I was pretty taken by the arachnid aesthetic of my early pipe-cleaner prototypes and thought I'd try to build the final walker in that style. 

I created the legs using foam core with pins creating a knee joint. The segments of each leg were also bridged by a strand of music wire so that the legs would be taut but flexible. The front legs are mounted to the servo using rubber bands so that as the servo pivots, the legs sweep back.

In theory this should pivot the walker forward around the opposite rear leg, which would then catch and serve as the new pivot as the opposie front leg turns. In practice, however, the legs tended to either slide or snag on the ground and the spider tends to just sit and twitch rather than actually walk.

Parts Used

Servo(1)

Arduino (1)

Breadboard (1)

Foam Core

Music Wire

Rubber Bands

Pins

Hot Glue

Potentiometer (1)

Images

Crawler

Arduino Code 

 I used the default potentiometer-servo code provided for the lab.