Sunday, December 31, 2017

XMRemoteRobot - movement achieved with "inchworm gait"


Snake Robot hardware milestone today -  reliable ongoing operation responding to servo commands. Now we have a testbed, the first programming exercise is the "inchworm" gait which is the simplest of snake robot "gaits".

The biggest challenge in the last 3 days has been the head section intermittently going dead as its Arduino Nano microcontroller resets itself. After a lot of detective work I tracked it down to momentary voltage drops. The power supply to the forward section was through thin wires that gave a voltage drop from about 5.3V to 4.8V. There were extra momentary voltage drops when servos came under load and that caused the microcontroller resets. The fix was to run a second parallel pair of wires, V+ and GND from the regulator on Rib05 to the power board on Rib02. That may not be the full story because adding these similar thin wires resulted in a minimal voltage drop rather than halving the effect as expected. It is therefore a good idea to check sections in detail for an unexpected resistance effect.

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