Project

A spider learns to walk

Committed students have their own visions: Christopher Kral developed this robot spider as part of a semester project during his bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering . Self-initiated and creative.

The kinematics of the spider's legs are based on coupling gears, which in turn are driven by a spur gear. The coupling gear has been optimized so that the spider frame always remains at a constant height.

And these technical features have taught the robot spider to walk:
The spider manoeuvres in the same way as a tracked vehicle: counter-rotating movement of the left and right legs leads to a change of direction to the left or right.
There are always four legs on the ground.

The spider uses the following components to do this:

• an ultrasonic sensor (transmitter and receiver), which is swivel-mounted to scan the room,
• a microcontroller (Arduino UNO),
• a 7.4 V LiPo battery as an energy source.

By the way: Working on the robo-spider was so much fun that there is now a follow-up project with spider 2.0.