Phobos

Intro

I built this small quadruped robot to use as a wifi-enabled terrestrial drone in my back yard. The body houses a Lynxmotion SSC32 U for driving servos, and the head has a Raspberry Pi Zero W, along with the Raspberry Pi camera.

This project is still in progress, though it's been back-burnered for some time. The inverse kinematic model is complete (it can stand and shift around), but I haven't implemented the walking gait yet. Code for the robot is all in Python.

The pan-tilt mechanism for the head is pretty interesting - it uses two servos connected in a V to the base of head. The neck constrains the head to only turn and nod. It cannot tilt (e.g., cock to one side). Using some trigonometry, it was easy to work out the inverse kinematics to move the head around.