Wow

[DarkWing]

Mad Cat, with twin PPC's. Nice. Long time since I saw one of those.

Anyway, back to the point at hand. In the 80's I was driving through Columbus Ohio and I got to see the Ohio State Walking machine. It had a Kawasaki 750 motor to generate power and hydraulics, held one man as a driver, and had 7 computers onboard, one for each of the six legs and one to coordinate the interaction of the legs and translate the drivers inputs into actions. Pretty cool. Also, you need to search and find the "spider" eight legs, eight axis of movement from center. Each leg is articulated eight or nine ways, I forget. Can be walking toward you and in mid stride start walking 90 degrees to the left or right. Way cool. Took a super computer at the time to get all of that to work.

Also, if robotics is an interest, look up the "micro mouse" competition. That is pretty cool as well.

D.W.

[mdwyer]

Anyway, back to the point at hand. In the 80's I was driving through Columbus Ohio and I got to see the Ohio State Walking machine. It had a Kawasaki 750 motor to generate power and hydraulics, held one man as a driver, and had 7 computers onboard, one for each of the six legs and one to coordinate the interaction of the legs and translate the drivers inputs into actions. Pretty cool.

We held the walking machine competition at CSU while I was there. A lot of big-name universities brought some amazing equipment. One group brought something that looked like a walking golf-cart. CMU brought something that borrowed parts from from NASA explorers. There was some incredible engineering.

But what was really telling was that the winning bot was the CSU Xplorer, that looked like it was built from a pair of garage door openers and the contents of a Radio Shack. It was slow, stupid, and had a very simple walking motion, if you can even call it that... but it beat out all the more insectile or anthrophomorphic ones! Sometimes, simple is better!

[johnnyapollo]

There's actually two very skinny guys inside the thing....

[Joe_Black]

That's pretty neat, thanks for posting the link Bart! What I find interesting is that it doesn't appear to "see" where it's placing it's feet so much as react to the effects after they're down on whatever surface it's traversing. Then again, in the later section of the video where it appears to be "bounding" it seems to jump over a section of the track.

There was a Finnish subsidiary of John Deere that specialized in forestry equipment and they developed a hexapedal tractor for getting through protected areas of forest to perform selective logging operations. Here's a couple clips as found on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1h3vcLybfA and: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gk-yQ1H3M8&NR=1
Pretty wild, especially with all the articulation, and I've seen a couple clips on the original manufacturers site (apparently they're now defunct) showing it moving at faster speeds.

RFDTV had a recent "Classic Machinery" that featured another walking tractor from the 40's or 50's that was designed to work boggy areas in Canada, but I couldn't find any online clips to post. Neat stuff!

Speaking of the MadCat with PPC's... Not quite that, more like the "Flea", there's this classic clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtovadY4lYk