Locomotion and prototyping – Andres Malaga

Molly and I first attempted to mimic a horse’s gait, which consists of the horse lifting the front hoof of one side and the back hoof of the other at the same time, alternating them to achieve forward motion. We first tried to replicate that with a design made out of legos connected to a motor. Although it achieved the motion pattern we wanted, it was very difficult to have the motor move the mechanism while it remained stable. The next class, we changed the design and started prototyping a set of ‘legs’ arranged in the shape of an X (two long straight ‘legs’, one on each side of the motor), which would spin and bring the motor forward. Molly prototyped the model with two rods of metal, and we then proceeded to create a laser-cut version of it, which involved a ‘foot’ attached to either end of the legs, to provide a bigger contact surface that allowed the motor (which acted as the body) to be propelled forwards. The motor was powered by batteries, which were put like if they were a tail to provide balance to the system. The system no longer mirrored a horse’s locomotion, it now mirrored the Common Basilisk, popularly known as the ‘Jesus Christ Lizard’, which runs over water moving its legs really fast in the same pattern as our system. Improvements could definitely be made to the system, such as making the legs curved instead of straight, essentially resembling a prosthetic lower leg such as that used by former runner Oscar Pistorius, which improves the contact between the foot and the table, allowing it to maybe be more stable. We tried to do a similar thing by adding foam to the feet’s contact surface, but it resulted in the system moving as if it was jumping around, instead of achieving a more gait-like motion. The first picture is the prototype Molly did with the metal rods. The video after that is a video of a common basilisk running through water, and the next two are our mechanisms working before and after adding foam.

Final Project: Documentation

By Gabrielle Branche

Synopsis:

My final project was to create a fully functioning moth that holistically worked.  My report explains the process and has the code for my final. See report here. Photos and Videos of the moth at different stages of its development can be found here.

Reflection:

This final project for me served as a way to tie together all the aspects of Bio-inspired Robotics that was learnt in this class. Firstly I wanted to perfect the behavior of my moth as we addressed that intelligence is a large factor in making a machine a robot. Although my robot did not have artificial intelligence, I hoped that my robot could respond to its environment with the use of hard code. 

Secondly I looked at locomotion. While my robot still had wheels I aimed to explore its true movement bu looking at the flapping of its wings. I also tried to tie in what I learned in my other class by lazer cutting and manually building the wings. This way my robot could be more authentic and go beyond behavior

Finally had time allowed I would have used to webcam to have object recognition but this is now an extension and improvement should I decide to develop this bot further. 

This has been a great learning experience for me, starting with questioning what makes a robot a robot to the details of it such as using functions to polish and increase the robustness of my code. Most importantly I learned that to truly get into bio-inspired robotics, observation research and prototyping and the key steps to building something that has the potential to be great. 

Lab Report: Swarm Intelligence

By Gabrielle Branche

Synopsis: 

This lab was intended to explore the concepts of collective swarm behavior. My group and I decided to simulate lysosomes where our robots would be able to detect a foreign object, individually move to it until there is enough strength to push it out the boundary.

Results:

We coded the project as a group by splitting up the tasks and coding separately. After wee came together and compiled the codes we debugged the larger code as a group. 

We were able to get the webcam to read our code and input and anazlyse values for the QR code such that they could be sent to the microbit in a form that could be used to control the speed and direction of the bots when a foreign object was detected. 

Challenges:

While we were able to put the code together, we were not able to successfully achieve serial communication between the webcam and the microbit due to time constraints and final projects. 

Reflection:

While this lab was ultimately not completed, it was perhaps one of the most beneficial labs I have done this semester as it really brought home to concept of functions. By using functions in our code we were able to follow the process more smoothly, make more robust code and separate the tasks easily in a way that we could put it all back together again. In a way we as a team worked as a swarm because we had a challenge, divided the work and worked individually but when put together we were able to overcome a larger problem. In this way we were able to work collectively and it helped me put into perspective the benefits of swarm behaviour.