“Making a simple quadruped which can move in a straight under static stability.
Preface
This robot was built from scratch and I had to reiterate on the core concepts a couple times. It was built under tight time constraints. The final product here is not a 100% working model (yet) due to some software and hardware kinks ( I’ll list the ones I found below). The codes have been put on my GitHub repository and any and all suggestions to improve upon it is most welcome.
There are obviously better and more efficient ways to go about making it. But this is the method I followed and I would recommend reading the whole thing instead of blindly jumping into the build, as this is more of an explainer rather than a project that gives you a solid working model in the end.
Basic Goals
An ideal quadruped should have 3 dof on each leg, allowing it to have the full range of motions, i.e. it can move forwards, backwards, sideways, rotate etc. But as this was my first project of this type, I decided to give the legs only 2 dof. This means it can only move forwards and backwards. The robot is statically stable, meaning at any given time at-least 3 legs are on the ground and it will maintain its balance at any point of its motion.
Before going into the movement and inverse kinematics, I would like to jump forward a bit and show my initial two models, and point out the shortcomings of each.”