Tell A Friend

  • Friend's email:
 

"Thing"
Another entry in the Quadruped challenge

I was trying to think outside the box and come up with some other locomotion systems that might be considered "quadruped" in the sense that they have 4 feet, but maybe not in the typical rectangular setup that we usually think of when somebody uses the word.

I asked myself "What happens when you put all 4 feet on the same side of the critter?" and I suddenly realized I was talking about something that looks a lot like a hand. I immediately thought of "Thing" from the Adam's Family and started building.

The model you see here took 3 tries to get right. It works pretty well as long as you don't put too much weight on it, and it looks really cool when it moves!

And, of course, I just HAD to make a video using the Adam's Family theme song.

Video of this project can be found here:
http://www.efn.org/~kirbyf

Edit: I just added 2 additional pictures of "Thing" with the NXT mounted. Thanks to MorrowindJim for pointing out I'd be immediately disqualified without them.

Posted by:

 GhostInside

Created:

 16 June 2007

Rate:

 

Tags:(?):

 nxt200706, quadruped, hand

Beta Version

Here is my previous version of "Thing", you can see the double-stacked pullys used as an offset mechanism, and the clunky sled mechanism at the back. This model barely moved because there was just too much weight for the fingers to work well. This version was actually designed to be able to turn. The left 2 fingers were controlled by one motor and the right 2 fingers were controlled by the other motor. The problem was that the main axle had to be split in the middle to account for the 2 sides. This meant that a lot of the power from the outer drive gears was lost due to pieces on the cam shaft flexing. I could have fixed this by seperating the 2 halves a lot more and driving each of them from both sides, but then it would have looked like 2 sets of 2 fingers, not a single hand. So in the final version I dropped back to a single cam shaft, driven by 2 motors to maximize power. The .RBT file for both models is the same, it's pretty much just A and C move forward 100%.

Comments

10 most recent comments out of 22  [VIEW ALL]

  • GhostInside

  • XHu- A long time ago, one of the first shows on american television was "The Adams Family". (They later made it into 2 modern movies) On that show, there was a character that was nothing more than a crawling hand. The name of the character was just "Thing". So I named this bot "Thing" in reference to that. I seemed a little more unique than "Robohand" or "Handbot".

  • Posted 2145 days and 14 hours ago


  • bra888

  • Cool!
    It really looks like a hand. This is certainly the most unique Quadruped Building Challenge entry ever.
    And congratulations on winning the robot design award

  • Posted 2141 days and 22 hours ago


  • MindstormsGeek123

  • Awesome! That looks exactly like a hand!

  • Posted 2138 days and 17 hours ago


  • greencorn

  • I made some thing like that once but it was'nt as compact and it did'nt get the robot
    desighn award eather!CAN YOU SHOW US HOW TO MAKE the "THING"!!!It looks so
    much like a praying mantice in the front.

  • Posted 2101 days and 20 hours ago


  • NXT000

  • please add instructions on how to beild it.

  • Posted 2057 days and 11 hours ago


  • rammjet

  • Isee you ahev the lithium battery too. I think this robot would be great for the halloween competition.(tag it nxt200710)

  • Posted 2055 days and 16 hours ago


  • stefan1995

  • add the tag nxt200710

  • Posted 2048 days and 2 hours ago


  • minifig2222

  • that...is...AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • Posted 900 days and 12 hours ago


  • danwaisel

  • can it move each finger seperately?

  • Posted 894 days and 17 hours ago


  • BigD4Christ

  • that is impressive

  • Posted 740 days and 13 hours ago


Add A Comment


Please log in or register to add a comment