Mechanical Design - Team 1

What the results of the analysis will look like mechanically is shown below. Notice that to move the position of C in an arc, it makes sense to have a link controlled with an actuator.

If we wanted to couple all three legs on one side to have the same stride length we can use a six-bar mechanism to do that.

We want the grounded joint positions on each side to change in alternate directions along the arc as seen on the right. This will give us a long stride length on one side and a short stride length on the other.

We designed this robot to be fabricated mostly from 3mm acrylic to save machining and printing time through use of the laser cutter.  The frame had joinery teeth to facilitate bonding the panels together with epoxy, and the walls of the frame were braced with internal gussets. The drive motor is coupled to all six legs via three D-shafts, timing belts, and pulleys. The driving links of each leg have alternating D-profile holes to make the phases of each leg in line for proper walking. The two six-bars reside inside the robot's chassis and a steering system is made with a servo, hollow aluminum shaft, laser-cut acrylic actuation arms, and ball joints for connecting links.  To save on cost and weight, there are no ball bearings used in this design; all joints were made with only bolts, low-friction PTFE washers, and machined Delrin spacers.  For frequently-rotating parts of the assembly–such as the D shaft seats in the frame and the servo shaft–we did make use of dry-running bushings. Rubber washers were added to the feet to increase traction. Here is some renders of the final CAD.

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