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Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

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Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#51
post #19

It has the wrong kind of motors to be interesting. Servos are a dead end, imo. The interesting robot projects now are the ones embracing brushless motors with encoders and dynamic walking gaits. It’s the same components that are used in drones.

Could you provide some examples of these projects?

Here is an open-source, 3D-printable quadruped with (almost) direct-drive actuation:

https://open-dynamic-robot-initiative.github.io

Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.00093.pdf

Videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkXU-5Oupg4

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#52
post #19

It has the wrong kind of motors to be interesting. Servos are a dead end, imo. The interesting robot projects now are the ones embracing brushless motors with encoders and dynamic walking gaits. It’s the same components that are used in drones.

Just going to share a YouTube channel (Skyentific) that I have learned a ton from when it comes to the considerations of sizing and power consumption when selecting motors for robotics. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcgqJ1blFKqbC2bWGY4Opmg

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#53
post #19

It has the wrong kind of motors to be interesting. Servos are a dead end, imo. The interesting robot projects now are the ones embracing brushless motors with encoders and dynamic walking gaits. It’s the same components that are used in drones.

Servos (hobbyist level) are a dead end in this application, but even marginal quality BLDCs are quite a bit more expensive. These servos can be swapped out for BLDCs in a retrofit, so I think this is a good starting point that can be expanded on.

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#54
post #49
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in Robotics (I made a simple ping-pong ball collector a while back https://sendcat.com/dl/D9DI15MAOjhKMFJYLJLADj64ywyU2qGWaKMSl... ). Are there places I should go or things I should read to find out more about the latest developments in robotics in general, or the use of brushless motors with encoders/dynamic walking gaits specifically?

Nice build :) Have you checked out EasyEDA + jlcpcb? It can improve the electronics aspects of robot projects. I searched a bit now to see if any new projects have shown up. Came across this one: https://hackaday.io/project/167845-mjbots-quad Could maybe be interesting, but I haven't looked into it. Here is a chinese motor manufacturer that makes more sane motors: http://www.gyems.cn/product.html Getting a drone or g…

> Nice build :) Have you checked out EasyEDA + jlcpcb? It can improve the electronics aspects of robot projects.

Thanks! Yeah, the electronics is a bit gross. This build was probably 6 years ago perhaps? I got it to the point that it worked and then it was kinda "done" and all that was left was polish, but it was really a toy so there wasn't much point and I left it.

Planning on building something for slug and snail control (NW UK, they can be a problem), and cat/badger/squirrel scaring in my garden (they dig up things). Will likely make use of PCBs with this so will check out the links.

> Here is a chinese motor manufacturer that makes more sane motors: http://www.gyems.cn/product.html

So I did some digging and found this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/user/SkyentificTube/videos

He does a some testing of some Turnigy motors (a bit like this: https://hobbyking.com/en_us/turnigy-aerodrive-sk3-6374-149kv..., there's a whole range) which looked cool, and he was using an odrive controller https://odriverobotics.com/ which also looked pretty handy, so there's some stuff to check out there, but he also did some tests with some gyems motors and they looked great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smQJeg87ff8

> dynamic walking systems are more complex

Given the speed of slugs and snails I am going to probably go for a less dynamic movement style. Less force, smaller motors, longer battery life. Though I like the idea of trying to program dynamic movement. The physical build for my more static movement style shouldn't be too hard to do.

> https://build-its-inprogress.blogspot.com/

Thanks, this is great!

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#55
post #38
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren’t sexy, isn’t that it — you want a sexy robot and RC servos don’t cut it

It's not that rc-servos are not sexy. It't that they suck. For a number of specific reasons well listed in other posts here. RC-servos are very cheap and very easy to use, so there are many projects using them. But there is no way to make a good robot out of them. It's a local maximum.

All true. But they are cheap, available, and have well understood limitations. Which means you can design and build your project quickly and cheaply, then upgrade to brushless motors with encoders or whatever when you have the time and funds. I think from that aspect they are a great way to get a project started without flinging cash at it.
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