I like making sculpture that moves or folds or that employ natural forces. I wanted to design a wind-driven sculpture of a horse walking. The wind-driven drive mechanism is simple enough to design but how to make the legs move?
I found this Dutch artist/engineer genius, Theo Jansen and one of the walking mechanisms he designed for one of his "Strand Beasts" (look him up on YouTube, he's amazing). So, I thought I'd try to build one of his mechanisms. I found a picture of one of his linkages and from that I made a drawing, and from that I made measurement and scaled it up. The photo at right shows the result of my prototype build. The prototype in the photo at right is about 11 inches tall. I wanted to see if it would work before I went to all the trouble to cut it all out of metal. I used Popsicle sticks and tongue depressors, a couple longer pieces of thin wood and a circle cut out of thin plywood. I used small steel bolts as linkage pins. It's a little stiff but it does work.
So, what we have here is what would be the linkage mechanism for the right half of a quadruped, front and rear legs. Four linkage arms connect to a peg on the little circle. As the circle turns, it drives the mechanism. This mechanism is designed to have the "feet" on the ground as much as possible for each cycle of the drive wheel. It's gait is not horse-like. It's more like a crab or a spider. But it might work for a stylized sculpture of a walking horse. However, my experiment is a success. I can build one, and it works the way it was designed.
If you had 4, 6, or 8 of these in a chassis, with solar powered electric motors and a little bit of electronics you could build a walking, radio controlled little robot, though steering it might be a problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment