Building Robots With Lego Mindstorms

Building Robots That Walk • Chapter 15 299

Designing Bipeds

Biped robots are among the most challenging projects you can ever face. In a

biped, the position of any single part, any single gram of mass, is critical to a

stable balance. If you replicate the designs that follow, you will see that all of them

walk very smoothly, but you will discover also that you can’t add additional parts

anywhere in their body and not feel the pain!

We will go through the approaches described in the The Theory Behind

Walking section at the beginning of the chapter: interlacing legs (Figure 15.9)

and COG shifting (Figure 15.11). For this latter category, we will explore ...