Purrminator

By William Gulliksen og Alexander Helstad

1) Servo actuated quadruped walking robot

We thought it would be interesting to make a cat robot (quadruped) that walks on itself without a cable attached. It will be a challenge to make it balance itself and not fall over. We want to design it so it resembles a real cat with a 3d-printed cat head and tail.

2) Goals

The goal of this project is to make a robot "cat" that can move on itself without a cable. We plan to optimize the speed the robot can walk/run, and we are going to measure how fast it moves across a 10 meter stretch with a stop watch.

The milestones are as follows:

1. Ability to balance.
2. Ability to walk.
3. Ability to run.

We are going to be using a similar servo/joint setup as in the following references. We will have different shaped 3d-printed parts and make sure it looks cat-like and we will do some iterations of trial and error to make it functional.

• First inspiration: ^1
• Second inspiration: ^2

3) Sketch

We are going to make a simple robot quadruped with some features so it looks like a cat (3d printed head and tail etc). As the sketch suggests we need 12 servos. In the knees and hips we are going to use the same type of servo. For the limb-attaching servos we are going to use stronger servos since they will have to endure the weigth of the entire leg. We probably will not have time to add active balancing, so these servos enable us to calibrate the balance as well.

We will probably have to change the speed and timing of the servos to match a faster and faster gait of the cat.

4) Bill of materials (BOM)

5) Plan

We will make simpler parts first, to make sure we can make the cat walk and then afterwards redesign parts to look even more like a cat.