James Bruton's Unique Strandbeest

This unconventional walker gets around on a single row of legs.

Jeremy Cook
4 years agoRobotics

Strandbeests are linkage-based walking creatures, originally designed by Theo Jansen to travel under wind power with no electronics whatsoever. While others have followed in his footsteps, making everything from human-powered ‘beests to walkers controlled by electrical motors, they all seemed to have one thing in common: two rows of legs that step sequentially to keep things relatively level.

Since a number of strandbeest legs simulate a wheel, YouTube hacker James Bruton wondered if such a ‘beest could instead be constructed with a single row of legs. The idea is that these legs would be split into two sets and controlled like a Segway-style two wheeled balancing robot. Bruton outlines the mechanicals in the first video below, with four 3D-printed strandbeest linkages, and an offset gear system that allows it to drive each leg in a full rotation without getting stuck. In the second, he elaborates on more setup details. These include mounting brushless motors with a belt drive to provide power, and a rather prominent offset battery mass to align the center of gravity in the correct position.

Motors are driven with an ODrive board, and overall control is via a Teensy 3.2 and MPU6050 IMU to keep it upright. User interface consists of a couple initialization buttons, and a potentiometer to set a zero point for balance.

Bruton’s unique strandbeest was able to take a few steps at a time with four legs, which was improved after increasing this number eight. It’s an interesting challenge as the leg linkages move in a different pattern than the bot’s PID controller would normally encounter. Perhaps we’ll see more development future. Bruton mentions the possibility of adding some compliance to smooth its motion out in the second video, so maybe that will get it walking even further!

For a more "conventional" take on strandbeest manufacture (if there is such a thing) you can also check out my ClearCrawler remote controlled beest-bot here!

Jeremy Cook
Engineer, maker of random contraptions, love learning about tech. Write for various publications, including Hackster!
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