Goodbye, AVC

A couple of days ago, I formally cancelled my plans to compete in this year's AVC. I was on backorder, and hadn't even started my robot yet.

So, I guess I can spill my secret plan now. If anyone wants to run with it, fine. I don't even need credit.

I was going to build a biped. The design is based on the little wind-up ducks you can get that waddle along on two feet. The feet are designed such that the device is stable without active balancing.

My idea was to use a four-bar parallelogram linkage, with two stepper motors to make sure they always turned in sync. A third motor was at the knee of one of the legs, to do steering.

It is not designed for speed, but for coolness. I didn't want to do another robot built into an RC car. That has been done to death, and I couldn't do it last time anyway.