Guided robot with only one motor

The photo shows a small radio-controlled robot with six short legs. He is able to quickly move across the floor, not running, but rather crawling like a beetle. The robot is called 1STAR, which stands for “1 actuator STeerAble Robot” (single-engine controlled robot). A feature of the design of this baby, which can not just move, but also turn right and left, is the presence of only one motor. It would seem, but so what, because the cars he is also alone. But cars drive on wheels, and here we are talking about crawling .

In addition, the motor in 1STAR is not reversible, rotates in one direction. And if the torque from the motor is transmitted to the legs by means of gears, then the turning is done through the use of flexible and springy middle legs.


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As you can see in the video, only the middle pair of legs is springy, the front and back pairs are made of rigid material. The second cunning design is the use of accurate and metered acceleration of the rotation of the motor. At each moment of time, only three legs of the robot touch the surface, according to the triangle pattern: front and back on one side, middle one on the other. At the moment of a sharp acceleration of motor rotation, the flexible and springy middle leg bends slightly and slightly lags behind the movement of rigid legs on the opposite side. When the middle leg touches the floor on the other hand, the rotation of the motor slows down. Therefore, the robot turns slightly around the “first” middle leg, during the touch of which the motor rotation speeds up for a short time. By the same principle, tracked machines turn: the rotation speed of one of the tracks slows down and the machine turns in this direction. If the motor speed does not change, the flexible middle legs act in the same rhythm with the front and rear, and the robot moves straight. Discrete switching acceleration and deceleration of the motor occurs very quickly, people do not even notice. But this is enough for the robot to move around quite quickly around obstacles.

Of course, such a design will not allow the creation of a highly mobile robot, and its reliability is not too great, given the large number of moving parts, including flexible ones. But it is certainly difficult to come up with something simpler and cheaper without the use of a wheeled chassis. At the same time, almost the entire structure can be easily printed on a 3D printer, and the use of just one motor drastically reduces the total cost, especially if you need to make a large number of such robots. For example, to assess the effects and search for victims of man-made and natural disasters.

1STAR was developed by David Zarrouk of Ben-Gurion University and Ronald S. Fearing of Berkeley University.