Yet another in the series on building a new leg for the quad A1:

In the spirit of my last post on the topic, here is another video-only update on a new leg design for the quad A1:

I and the quad A1 had a great time at the FAB16 festival in Somerville this past weekend. The robot got to do a lot of running around, it and I got to meet a lot of new people, and two bands showed up!

Here’s a video of the quad A1 and Spot hanging out trying tricks:

And here’s another one of a “dance off” (kinda) with the School of Honk band. Note that although both robots collapsed at the end of this video, the quad A1 got back up and kept dancing. (Spot wasn’t broken, they just didn’t want to right it when close-ish to people). Thanks to Kathleen and Josh from BD for inviting me into their area and for being such good sports!

The title says it all! Check out the quad A1 and friends there!

Check out the quad A1 and all the mjbots products at the FAB16 festival in Somerville, MA this Saturday August 14th from 10am to 4pm (with a rain date on Sunday).

I’m going to try something new for this effort, and instead of making a bunch of blog posts culminating in a video, I’m going to make a bunch of intermediate progress videos. They may, but may not, culminate in an overview blog post. Here’s the first!

Here’s the approximately annual giant video update:

If you’re interested in any of the topics in more detail, I’ve collected links to individual posts for each of the referenced items below.

Thanks for all your support in the last year!

Moteus

Announcement of moteus r4.3: Production moteus controllers are here!

In two previous posts (part 1, part 2) I discussed some changes I made to the gait sequencing on the quad A1. Things are working relatively well now, sufficient that I was able to take this compilation video in one sitting without any gait or mechanical failures! I actually took a lot of the outdoor shots from this video in the same session, so things are definitely getting more robust.

It’s only October, but the weather is what it is and robots will do what they do!

While testing the improved gait sequencing for the quad A1 I got some footage of it traversing a few different types of outdoor semi-rugged terrain.

Tree roots

The first clip shows it walking over some tree roots. In this particular instance, it just uses a high stepping gait, which allows the feet to get on top of the root. The gait sequencing doesn’t handle walking over the taller part of the root very well yet… the robot can get “high centered” on two legs, with the other two flailing in the air.