Annually at University of Southampton Malaysia Campus, the much anticipated TEDxUoSM event will catch the local community’s attention. I was honored to be qualified as a speaker for the event, so I decided to take up the challenge to share my interests with presentation and demonstrate a live spider robot on stage!

But how does a spider walk?

This is my first time building a spider robot, so I definitely need some online references. I managed to find a working simulator online by a youtube channel named Kris Temmerman who created his own hexapod robot using this software. I have added his work at the bottom of this blog, be sure to check him out!

To put it simple, whenever a spider/hexapod walks, three of its legs has to be touching on the ground, while the other three repositions forward to prepare the next traction. To maintain balance during the positioning of the legs, an example would be north west leg, south west leg and and east leg be touching the ground while the rest of the legs move forward as shown as the gif below. (GitHub Code is also attached to the bottom of the page)

The spider robot consist of an CT-UNO (Arduino Uno) with a G15 servo shield connected with via IO pins to an ESP8266. The ESP8266 as a receiver to receive commands from my laptop using UDP protocol while the Arduino is responsible for controlling the motors of the spider robot. I have also added the list of materials at the bottom of this post.

Now all that’s left to pitch! Check out my TEDx talk on how you can build a robot by observing animals as inspiration for your next project!

Lets push it a bit further…

Whoops, did you thought I was done after my TEDx talk? No way, if you really seen a spider looks like in real life, the robot is far from the real thing. Hence I decided to kick it up a notch by first changing its chassis from cardboard to a plastic box I got from my university during their spring cleaning event.

I decided to add an extra degree of freedom to each of the legs to give the robot in control of elevation. Here’s how the robot looks like in 3D design.

Sadly, after I added an extra set of motors to the chassis, it broke down due to the excessive torque given by the locomotion, I have no choice but to use an aluminum chassis for the robot instead.

Pipes are added to reinforce the aluminum chassis as the metal bends easily when the legs are moving, further improvements can be made by changing the body to Perspex material instead.

I also changed the ESP8266 to a WIFI UNO based ESP32 for further developments (as well as faster connection speed). I have also swapped the LI-ION battery to a 11.1v LIPO battery.

The robot is officially done! Enjoy the rest of the videos!

Features

This shows the standard movement of the hexapod robot including moving forward, backwards, left and right.

A smartphone is attached to the top of the robot and live streams the video footage to my unity desktop app, I can also control the direction of the robot using the arrow keyboard on my laptop.

Of course, there are lags in streaming the video but the quality can be improved in the future.

The spider robot also can track objects in its environment using the smartphone as the one giving the directions to the ESP32 via UDP, the ESP32 then relays the information to the Arduino via IO pins, which then controls the motors the direction it should turn to.

GitHub Code

https://github.com/HankRobot/Spider-Robot

Materials

Codes I used from which I should give credit to so I don’t look like a bad person

As a disclaimer, I don’t see myself building this entire project from ground up so here are the people who contributed their code which made this project possible.

MatthewHallberg’s AR robot provided the streaming and UDP controls to my spider robot, I used his project and added a few garbage collection methods to make the program run smoother on my spider robot. Do check out his channel if you want to learn more about Augmented Reality topics.

Kris Temmerman created the entire inverse kinematic hexapod robot from scratch using only C++ for his code. He also creates a bunch of other cool robots which I definitely recommend you checking it out.

You have reached the end of the blog!

Thanks for reading my documentation! Please do check out other blog posts on my website if such topics interest you!