What do you do when your child asks you to build them a robot? Well if you’re Jose Julio, you build an Arduino-based ArduSpider robot. He constructed the robot using a minimalistic hexapod setup (only three servos for six legs). The body of the robot is constructed with a carbon & 1.5mm balsa sandwich. The legs are made of 2mm carbon rods and use some aileron hinges for the front legs. Also a 6gram micro servo was used for the middle legs (that balances the robot) and two 16 grams servos for the rear legs (that connects also to the front legs with 1.5mm rods). The robot has also a simple behavior scheme (in autonomous mode). When ArduSpider becomes tired, bored and happy it gives a different perspective on interaction or reacts differently in those situations. The eyes, made of LCD’s, also show different patterns depending on the state of the robot. ArduSpider has three modes that the person controlling can choose from. The first is: Manual mode, where Jose used the HW mux in the Ardupilot board so you directly control the three servos with your Tx. “Making this ‘thing’ walk is a real challenge, you need to synchronize your movements, but once you have mastered you can do a lot of fun movements,” said Jose. The second is Assisted mode: You control the robot like an RC car (2 channels). The walk and turn movements (sequences) are executed by the controller, so if you move the stick forward, the robot start to walk forward, if you move the stick to the right, the robot turns to the right... the speed and turn amount are proportional to the stick. The third is Autonomous mode: In this mode the robot starts to walk avoiding obstacles with the IR sensor. When the robot becomes tired it starts to move slowly until it is so tired that it takes a ‘seat’. When the robot becomes bored it starts to call your attention. If you bring your hand over to it, it becomes happy, jumping and continuing to walking. For a complete walkthrough of Jose’s build and downloadable source code please visit: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/arduspider-sara-my-daughters
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