PSybeR Cat

Many species in animal kingdom moves dynamically in their natural habitat. The diversity in the motion skills present in a single species is vast and highly refined than what technology have achieved so far. Versatility and agility are the two main characteristics that defines the motion of an animal. Eckert and Ijspeert (2018) defined agility as follow “Agility is representing a previously acquired and size dependent set of locomotion skills, executed in a precise, fast and ideally reflexive manner to an outside stimulus”. Today, most of the locomotive machines are either using wheels or tracks for travelling. However, the problem of using such means of locomotion is that they cannot travel on an uneven terrain and cannot avoid obstacles efficiently. A better way to travel on land for a machine is by using leg mechanisms, as they can walk or run on any terrain, jump over the obstacles or even climb on highly steep hills.

Machines with relatively simple mechanisms (such as wheeled or tracked) are insufficient to travel in difficult terrains. Whereas, legged robots are highly adaptable to move on uneven and difficult terrains. The Bipedal robots (two-Legged) and Quadruped robots (four-legged) have wider applications in industries as they are highly agile and have flexible applications. Quadrupedal robots have shown better results when compared with the Bipedal robots. This can be attributed to its four legs that provides low centre of gravity, stability, and ability to lift heavy loads. Building a simple robot is itself an overwhelming task. Designing a robot with complex four-legged mechanism is even more daunting task. One way to design such an agile robot is to first look deep into the nature. Nature has plenty of examples for us to observe. Researchers around the world have always been fascinated by nature and tried to reproduce its elegant designs into mechanical systems. Some researchers have tried to replicate the walking gait of a quadrupedal animal using hydraulics actuators, some have tried using pneumatic actuators, while some have even tried using solenoids. In this paper, we have tried to build a quadrupedal robot using servo motors. Servo motors are cheap and easily available in the market, hence can be used by many to try and build their own project for research purposes.

To design and fabricate a Quadruped Robot with rich motion skills.

We have used Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) for manufacturing. FDM 3D printing is the most cost-effective way of producing custom thermoplastic parts and the most widely used for rapid prototyping among various industries. The following were the printer parameters:

• Nozzle Temp: 210℃
• Bed Temperature: 60℃
• Layer Height: 0.2 mm
• Nozzle Diameter: 0.4 mm
• Material: PLA+

• The Quadruped robots (four-legged) has been successfully designed using servo motors.
• Quadruped Robot has been fabricated with rich motion skills.