Walking

So, I've been working on my user interface tools a lot lately, and part of that has been building up the concepts that I am going to use to make MicroRaptor take his first steps (literally) towards walking. In the process of building and debugging these tools, I've been building motion sequences to stand, to transition into a first step, and then to start actually walking. One of the things I discovered is that in order to do the kind of walking that I want MicroRaptor to do (large steps, with a 6" stride), the robot needs to be very flexible in terms of how it can move its legs.

Getting MicroRaptor to transition to the first step, where one leg is moved out in front of the other, turned out to be fairly straight forward. What I discovered at that point is that because the legs are so far from each other, you have to do a significant weight shift in order to move the weight back over the front leg so he can lift his rear leg around. With the configuration I had before, I just couldn't make this weight shift happen (see top image).

However, after looking more carefully, I realized I was not using the full range of motion that the foot servos could provide, mainly because the bracket was getting in the way. I flipped the brackets over, and suddenly the whole thing became a lot simpler (see second image). With this setup, the feet can flex forward another ten degrees, which makes all the difference in the world when it comes to shifting weight around...