Symbol Engine

I have been working with Tolga on a 4 motor walker. After taking care of the electronics we started working on walking dynamics. Figuring out the timings needed to control this beast wasn’t that easy. Luckily Tolga had a working Wowwee Roboquad lying around. So we had a chance to analyze its walking patterns.

Here is the basic schema of a 4 motor walker. You can see the numbering scheme we used to identify each motor. Arrow points to which way the robot is going when we say it is going forward. Motors are running counter-clockwise with negative voltage and clockwise with positive voltage. Now to get to the juicy part:

• Please note that the patterns for rotating are 2 times longer than the patterns for movement. As a result turning is slower.
• If your robot is moving in very small steps, try longer delays between steps.
• If the robot is moving faster in one directionor leaning slightly to one direction while walking, there is probably a problem with its weight distribution. Try to distribute the weight as equally as you can, especially between back and front