ROBO ALIVE Robotic Snake Series 3 (Red) Light Up Toy, Battery-Powered Robotic Toy, Realistic Movements, Toy Lizard

Product Information

This step is not adding anything new to the arduino, but marking the end of the electrical portion of the project and beginning the materials portion. From here on out, all the pieces we mentioned separately in previous steps need to be brought together and starting to create a cohesive project. We give a picture of everything we have added to the breadboard and the arduino setup. We also have the finished code that we will be using to control the snake from here on out. Adding the vibration motor is very similar to the LEDs. It does not require to be connected to the 5V power supply on the arduino board, but gets it’s power from the Pin it connects to. We are connecting the vibration motor to Pin 10. It does not matter what pin you connect the vibration motor to, but we wanted to physically separate it from the LED groups for less confusion.

Again, the code is similar to the photocell instructable. We create photocellReading variables to store the analog readings from the pins and then start the main loop. We will set the variable to the analog reading and print it out to see if it is working. We pause for 1 second, or else the reading will print out so fast we will be unable to read them. The advantage of this approach is a computationally feasible level of abstraction for our soft snake robot to perform motion planning in an obstacle course, despite is relatively complex body deformation. We put this concept into a sampling based motion planning algorithm and bound the problem using the following assumptions: a modular system architecture comprising identical modules with integrated 3D soft actuation, valving, and electronics; To achieve sidewinding locomotion, the soft robotics modules should bend such that their end-plates (tips) move in circular paths with a desired phase delay between adjacent modules. For ease of implementation and to increase computational efficiency, we approximate this ideal circular gait and develop a hexagonal gait which can be simply implemented by binary inflation/deflation for each actuation chamber without controlling the pressure, which would be required to achieve precise circular tip trajectories. Figure 4 shows that the tip trajectory of the modules performing the hexagonal gait is tracing a deformed hexagon projected on the spherical workspace of the module. The circuit is the same for both robotic snakes. During the wiring process make sure there is enough wiring space for each segment to rotate completely, especially in the 2D snake.

Comments

In the code, you can see we have a long list of if else statements controlling the speed of each motor. This code works for our snake and our photocell sensor/motor combination. If you have changed the materials for your snake or find that these values don't work for you, when feel free to change the values until you find speed control that works for you. Our snake is meant to work in low light and at a pretty fast speed. If you want your snake slower, for example, you may want to widen your range of lrValues in the if else statements, so that it will take a high powered light directed at one sensor before the motors reach highest speed.

Important note: The scale might be wrong! I design my components in Fusion 360 (in mm units), exported the design as an .stl file into MakerBot software and then printed it on a Qidi Tech printer (a clone version of the MakerBot Replicator 2X). Somewhere along this workflow there is a bug and all of my prints come out too small. I have been unable to identify the location of the bug but have a temporary fix of scaling each print to 106% size in the MakerBot software, this fixes the problem.If the steps got taller and more slippery, the snake would move more slowly and wriggle their front and rear body less to maintain stability. Play around with sensors. Shine a flashlight into them to make the readings spike, cover them to make the readings drop. Your readings may have different values than ours, this is okay. Each sensor is different and it depends on the ambient light in the room at the time. We ran the system using different steering offsets ϕ, from −0.3 to 0.3, using the ILC. With a steering offset of 0, the SRS-4 will follow a straight line and the desired bending angle amplitude the ILC uses for each direction of each module is 0.7 rad. When the steering offset is between 0 and 0.3, the robot will turn in one direction. To explore the proposed 3D soft robotic snake's ability to operate on nonplanar environments, we developed a custom locomotion sequence based on the climbing motion of real snakes, which allows our robot to climb up a step (as shown in Supplementary Video S1). At least three modules are needed on the ground for the robot to perform snake-like lateral undulation locomotion and power the robot to move forward. The step climbing motion will result in intermediate states with several modules that cannot touch the ground when climbing up high steps due to the restriction of the module length. Thus, to gain higher thrust and better balance, we added one more module to the robot, and created this gait for a 5-module version of the robotic snake, without loss of generality. As a result, this version offers greater balance for some of the modules to be lifted off the ground.