Tote

Affordable spider robot

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Where are my robots? It’s already 15 years into the twenty-first century, and we still don’t have robots everywhere. Sure, there are some simple vacuum cleaners and some robo-pets for the ultimate geeks, but that is not enough! Especially since the vacuum cleaners don’t even walk. We need more walking robots everywhere!

I think that one of the reasons why we don’t have robots creeping and crawling all around us is that researching walking robots is a time- consuming, hard, and very expensive activity, traditionally confined to the secret military laboratories. You need a big room with a crane to hang your robot on, in case it falls, you need lots of hydraulic actuators and a pump to power them, you need sophisticated sensors and complex algorithms crunched on powerful computers, etc. At least that’s how it has been so far. Even building a simple hexapod from a kit, which, is not much more than a simple toy, can set you back hundreds of dollars. No wonder we make no progress.

That has to change. If we put a walking robot on the desk of every high school student out there, and let them try hack on them and try the craziest ideas, sooner or later someone will come up with a bunch of cool tricks that let you solve that leg trajectory optimization problem on an Arduino at 50Hz a second, instead of a supercomputer crunching on a single frame whole day. We have a lot of corners we can cut there. Plus, those same high school students are likely going to continue their experiments and research and graduate in robotics and build us that robot butler that we always wanted. Or something.

So that’s my plan with Tote. To solve the humanity’s burning problem of glaring lack of robots, I’m working on a robot that is suitable as a base for experimenting with robot gaits and related problems.

Logs

Components

Component

Count

Notes

SG90 Microservo

12

Or any other model of a small, 9g microservo, SG92R work even better

Arduino Pro Mini 3.3V

1

Arduino Nano 3.3V will work too

3.7V LiPo Battery

1

Or other power source

Printed Circuit Board

1

https://bitbucket.org/thesheep/tote/src/tip/fritzing/pcb2.zip

Power Switch

1

6-pin Male Pin Headers

7

optionally more/other headers

47kΩ 1206 SMD Resistor

2

optional for the battery monitoring circuit

47nF 1206 SMD Capcitor

1

optional for the battery monitoring circuit

1000µF Electrolytic Capacitor

1

optional for avoiding brownouts

IR Signal Sensor

1

optional for remote control

IR Remote

1

optional for remote control

piezo buzzer

1

optional for sound

battery charging circuit

1

optional for built-in battery charging

2A voltage regulator

1

optional for alternate power sources

Instructions

The assembly guide is published at http://tote.rtfd.org/ .