Walking Robot

One motor spins in a circle. Your team turns that circle into footsteps. Design a walking robot with 2 to 6 legs, all driven by a single TT motor, and make it cover as much ground as it can in 15 seconds.

The target

One hook, one number: how far your robot walks in 15 seconds.

How the run works

• Start behind the line. Set the robot down with every foot behind the start line.
• Flip the switch. The clock starts when the switch goes on. No pushing, no steering, no touching.
• 15 seconds. When time is up, the robot stops where it is.
• Measured straight ahead. Distance is measured from the start line to the robot's rearmost foot, straight forward, not along the path it walked. A robot that curves loses distance.
• Best of 3 runs. Your best run counts.

The rules

• 2 to 6 legs. Only feet touch the floor. No wheels or rollers, and nothing built to slide.
• One motor: the blue biaxial TT motor with metal gears. It has a shaft out both sides. Every leg runs off this one motor.
• Four 1.2 V AA rechargeable batteries. That's 4.8 V total. No other power.
• An on/off switch between the batteries and the motor. Required.
• Links: about 1/8 in thick wood panels.
• Joints: spacers or standoffs, either threaded or with a bolt through them.
• Gears: laser cut or 3D printed. You'll probably need them to carry the motor's turn to every leg.
• Shoes: rubber bands, hot glue, or anything else that adds grip to the feet.
• Size: fits inside 30 × 30 × 30 cm.

What you hand in

Everything below goes into one Google Slides deck, attached to the Google Classroom assignment. Take pictures of each part as you go — notebook pages, screenshots, and builds — and add them to the deck. That deck is your build log, and it's what your team shows at the gallery walk.

• Research and brainstorms. Photos of your notebook pages: walkers you looked at, and several leg ideas sketched by hand.
• Your linkage in the MIT Linkage Designer. Screenshots of the leg you picked, with its foot path and the DOF readout showing.
• Your computations. Photos of the notebook pages where you worked out each check by hand. See the box below.
• Your Onshape model. Screenshots of the links, gears, and chassis, assembled with mates.
• Prototype versions and change tracking. A photo of every version, and what failed, why, and what you changed. See change tracking.
• The final build. Photos of the finished robot from the side and from above, and your best 15-second distance.
• The robot itself. Walking, switched, and within every rule above.
• The gallery walk. No formal presentation. Your robot and the deck sit at a station. Classmates come by, try the robot, and you walk them through it. Part of the time you're the one visiting other stations. See how it works.

Dates

Where to start

• MIT Linkage Designer: the simulator from class. Build a leg, mark the crank as the motor and the foot as the target, and watch the path it draws.
• Strandbeest: Theo Jansen's walking machines. The Jansen leg on the guidance page comes from his published link lengths.
• Design Lab: type in your link lengths and check Grashof, transmission angle, the foot path, and whether one motor can drive it. Then predict your distance.
• The design checks: run every one before you cut a single part.