Mechanisms Building a walking mechanism with legs

I've seen at least two types of "vehicles" so far in Mekorama levels:

• Ones with motors for wheels
• Ones that B pushes while riding as an autopilot hack

I've been trying to build a walking robot / walking mechanism, using two or more legs. After a few iterations, I have one that's fairly successful! It gets stuck occasionally but always seems to unstick itself and keep plodding on! I'm curious if you get consistent walking on your device?



Mechanism

The basic mechanism behind the walker is a piston, which is 3 separate moving pieces. They need to be connected to a free-floating frame. For this piston demo, the frame is static stone blocks:



Previous Attempts

It took me a while to build a semi-successful walker. The first major / large attempt I tried is this unsuccessful 6-legged walker:



"Borp" is ancient Greek for "I pray for the death that will not embrace me, my life is God's mistake"

One thing to point out is that you need the legs to all rotate the same way, so you need to have two motors facing the same direction, or a way to make the legs spin the same way, which can be a bit awkward to design.

My next attempt was an unsuccessful quadropod:



"Blip" in a dead dialect of Ukranian means "Unstoppable toilet river" (it doesn't translate well).

Then I tried out an unsuccessful walker with two legs, inspired by those little wind up toys that walk:



It was during this design I realized I needed two things to make the walker reliable:

• You need each leg to rotate opposite the other one. To do this, you can't use two motors because it's easy for them to get out of sync and the legs don't step correctly. You need a single motor with an axle running between the two legs
• It's more stable to have the motors on the bottom than the top of the legs. I don't know why or if this is a requirement. I just noticed that Borp, may he burn in hell, is less stable than Madame Walker.

Iterating on the idea

Some things to iterate on:

• Increasing / decreasing the radius of the leg motor. I think this would make the steps bigger or smaller. Madame Walker has a radius of three, and I want to try with two. With a radius of 4 (one larger than madame, you run out of space
• Experimenting with the center of mass. Madame gets stuck sometimes and is a little wobbly. Would more blocks in certain places (like the center?) help? Would a free-hanging mass in the center help keep balance?
• Experimenting with the height of the legs / location of the swivel. I think a lower swivel would also mean a larger step
• Trying to add more legs. Working on Madame required larger legs to support the robot but I wonder if the legs could be made smaller and more added. The hexapod did poorly because it didn't get much traction.

So far I don't see any clear application of this to a level. Maybe if the robot is small enough, some mechanism that blocks the robot from walking over the win, until you unlock it. But even then it might only be able to get in one or two steps, not really showing off the walking ability

 

Wow very cool, I didn't think to abuse the self intersection bug of motors to reduce robot size. his legs are also one less moving part than mine because of the straight up and down guard rails for the leg joint to move through. Thanks for pointing me to this, it's great to see some similar ideas between mine and his (like single motor placed high)

woah this is great! More stable than Martin's or mine. It's a good looking design too. I'm impressed

 

I would still call this two legs but i'm impressed at the succinctness of the mechanism!