About:
Our team consisting of Cecilia Corral, Pradeep Radhakrishnan, Sadhan Sathyaseelan and Xie Haoran are working to mimicking the motion of a Coconut Crab.
The coconut crab whose motion we are intending to replicate is available in this video given below. The goal is to synthesize the motion of different limbs of the coconut crab using planar mechanisms.
Tasks Till Dec'12
Other interesting Links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWSbFfW3lC4
http://www.societyofrobots.com/actuators_servos.shtml
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Build-A-Walking-Robot---Passive-Walker/
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Task: Synthesizing motion of different legs.
Our goal is to use planar 1-dof mechanisms to mimic the motion of the coconut crab. We took the video and traced the motion as well as the path trajectory. Then our team carried out synthesis of the front and the rear legs. The graphical methods such as the Two- and three-position synthesis were used. Those methods are traditionally for single coupler link but the coconut crab's legs involve multiple links. Our assumption is of 3 links and are not considering the lateral movement of the 4th link. Though we tried the method, we were not able to exactly replicate the motion. So we decided to manually synthesize mechanisms. The following two videos show the final result that we intend to use. The first video is for the front leg and the second video is for the rear leg.