How-To: Three Servos Walking Robot (video)

How do you make a walking biped robot, with only three servos? Without saying a word, Frits Lyneborg from Let’s Make Robots shows you his inventive way of doing just that! Download the programs used in the robot on the video.

Subscribe to the The Latest in Hobby Robotics Podcast in iTunes, download the m4v video directly, or watch it on YouTube or Vimeo.

Tools needed are very basic like a saw, drill, ruler, hot glue gun, etc.

Materials are the 3 servos, some wood (4 paint sticks), hot glue, a couple of screws and some thread locking fluid. The servos are controlled by an AXE230, and batteries are used as balancing weight. You can use either 3 “normal” batteries, or 4 rechargeable; You just need somewhere between 4.5 and 5.5 volts.

You can adjust the the height of the batteries, and there are several parameters to adjust in the programming code as well, to make your robot walk well. You can also port the simple code to any other micro controller of your choice, and add sensors, arms and more to your own walking robot.

8 Responses to How-To: Three Servos Walking Robot (video)

Albert Filice on October 20th, 2011 at 11:44 am said:

Where can I get those servos and the chip? Do I assemble the micro controller myself?

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- Tim Kemp on October 20th, 2011 at 4:16 pm said:
  
  You can buy the boards from http://www.picaxe.com/. It looks like they are sold in kit form and you assemble them yourself.
  
  There are plenty of other options out there if you don’t care about using his source code. I recently built a similar project using three servos and a teensy board: http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/. These come fully assembled and you can program and power them through a USB cable. I have a lot of experience making things with microcontrollers and this is one of the easiest development platforms I’ve worked with. I highly recommend it.
  
  I got my servos through http://servocity.com/. They have a lot of different models. Their delivery was fast and they have a lot of useful information for makers on their site.
  
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AMalePoet on October 21st, 2011 at 12:26 pm said:

the video froze at about a minute and change about the point where you separated the drilled pieces. It wasn’t a buffering thing the video just stopped. The project looks interesting maybe I’ll look for it in instructionals.

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Andy on October 22nd, 2011 at 6:05 am said:

The RSS feed for MAKE posts with videos seem to actually include the entire video in it.

For this particular post, that mean my poor little feed reader was trying to load 400+ mb of data!

This is very bad.

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Rushik on January 22nd, 2012 at 8:16 pm said:

Which softwear used built a robot?and download link please send

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xkeksasx on February 1st, 2012 at 4:58 am said:

Can i make this robot with this Micro Controller?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/PICAXE-08M2-microcontroller-Surface-Mount-smd-/280816475866?pt=UK_BOI_Electrical_Components_Supplies_ET&hash=item4161f75eda

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- fritslyneborg on February 1st, 2012 at 11:54 am said:
  
  Well.. in principle, yes.. But it would be kind of extra effort, as it would be very hard to solder – it’s surface mount. You would need to buy extra parts, as the female plug, and you would not really save anything, so I think it would be a little strange thing to do – and not very wise to try
  
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amaguiz on December 11th, 2012 at 10:42 pm said:

Bonne info, savez-vous où je peux trouver un peu plus à ce sujet, a bientot

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