Introduction:
The end goal of this project was to create an art-motion-profile of a canine showcasing both walking and running motions.
Initially, our goal was to achieve these motion profiles on four mechanisms and they must be in sync to mimic the walking and running motions. If one of the four legs is out of sync the motion profiles would be out of phase. To achieve this, the proposal was to use only one actuator and offset each leg to match that of the canine's. Adding a bobbing head and wagging tail was also part of our initial goals. However, a lot of these proposals had to be scrapped due to time constraints and schedule conflicts between the team members.
Preliminary design:
The team focused on the profile of one leg at the beginning and several designs were developed. To do so, a video was chosen to base our project on, traced its motion, and ran a motion analysis on it.
Running the motion analysis and speaking to our TAs, the team knew that an eight-link mechanism inspired by the Theo Jansen mechanism was the solution to our project.
Several iterations of the eight-link mechanism were drawn up and analysis done on them.
The final design was then chosen and prototyping then was able to begin.
