[chbot] 6 legged walking Crab

[Charles Manning]

On Saturday 01 August 2009 14:56:24 sachin surendran wrote:
> Hi,
>      I am building a 6 legged walking Crab with 3 servos on each leg.
> I am looking for hobbyist who would like join along in the process of
> building it.
>
> My rough plans are :
> - To perfect the walking algorithm for 6 legged crab with 3 degrees of
> freedom
> - Experiment on self learning ( The bot learns itself to perfect its
> walking motion to take it from one place to another )
> - Mount a camera for purposes of image recognition.
>
>  Its been more fun working as a team than alone on this ,
> So any robotics enthusiast from christchurch who like to join along, go
> ahead
> and drop me a mail.

Hi Sashin

I think it would be a good idea to spend some time at the next meeting doing 
some brain storming on where this could go.

May I be so forward as to suggest that this project can easily be broken into 
distinct projects that can be pitched at different interest areas:
* Building/programming the platform (ie. the mechanics, sensors, etc).
* Analytically figuring out walking algorithms.
* Self learning algorithms.
* Video processing etc.

I am particularly interested in the self learning bit. How deep do you want to 
go with this? ie. Do you want to start with raw servo commands and get the 
robot to learn how to wiggle its legs and coordinate them to actually learn 
to walk or do you want to do higher level functions such as maze following? 
Or both?

What ideas have you considered so far? I guess at the most extreme you could 
consider a genetic algorithm approach to learn to walk which would be pretty 
interesting. There are some examples of things like this on the www, such as: 
www:http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/2955/

There have also been some interesting mechanical/algorithm co-designs where 
genetic algorithms have designed both the legs and the gait.


-- CHarles