Christmas may have passed but the presents still linger on. One of my Christmas presents (admittedly to myself) was an 8 legged walking robot. I have a great interest in walking robots and hope one day to have a whole herd of them. This is one of the first 8 legged walking robots that I have seen. The 6 legged walking robots (not the hexabug type) are fairly common and I have several already. I obtained this Little 8 version which is a self assembly kit, so you get the fun of making it and then the fun of playing with it.
I did like the fact that all the gears and DC motors were all contained within the initial body build. It makes it very self-contained and much easier to hack-about if you want to make it into something else.
There is no on/off switch with this robot so the construction requires you to assemble all the electronics, motors and controllers near the beginning , which does make it easier to test. The full body construction, without legs, can be seen in the above video. All that is needed now is to add the legs.
Having put it together, I'm not entirely sure I have assembled it perfectly correctly. It does seem to work mostly as I expected but there just seems something about it that does not seem quite correct.
I do like the way it is effectively two four legged walking robots side by side so it changes direct by altering the relative speed of each side of four legs. I might not keep the legs on it but the body seems good as does the two motor drive so I might try replacing the legs with wheels. Who knows!
Dubbie
PS Only one more Christmas present left to play with, which is a Tobbie 6 legged walking robot. I already have one of these, plus another make, so once assembled I will have three of them, which is enough to start working on some herd behaviours.