I recently purchased a kit that assembles into a 6 legged walking robot with IR obstacle detection. The Taiwanese manufacturer, CIC, produces the kit for about 25 American dollars. It can be purchased here
. This was my first kit bot, and I was very satisfied with what I got for the price. Don't expect a high performance, sophisticated machine like a multi-servo powered walker with this kit. You can expect however a very well produced and complete entry level robot that is very fun to build. This walker comes with 2, 3V motors and gearboxes, die cut plywood chassis parts, and all the electronics to control the motors and provide simple obstacle detection via an IR LED and sensor. The kit went together very easily and was a lot of fun to build. A few of the mounting holes in the chassis were a bit off position, but that was minor and easily alleviated. Pay very close attention to the electronic parts diagram and schematic when soldering the pre-etched board, because it's very easy to make a mistake. What I like most about this kit is its potential to be hacked and easily improved. I would really like to add my favorite microcontroller, the BS2 to this platform and then add sensors, etc. Higher torque motors would be a cool addition too. In conclusion, I think this would be a great project for someone who is looking to enter the robotics hobby world but doesn't want to spend a lot of money. In my opinion, this is probably the least expensive robotics kit on the market that actually has expansion capabilities. This would also be an excellent kit for learning how to solder. Check out the build pictures and video of this "monster" in action below:
The package
Contents of the kit. Impressive for $25.
The gear boxes. Strong but light steel frame with color coded gears.
Plywood chassis with gear boxes attached
The gear boxes. Strong but light steel frame with color coded gears.
Plywood chassis with gear boxes attached
3 comments:
Just put together this robot kit as a first foray into soldering. Like you, I found the kit to be quite enjoyable to assemble. It is a very good first project for soldering in particular, which is what I was using it for. I also found some of the mount points on the chassis to be a bit off, but like you said, that's easily corrected.
Thanks for the comment Shaun. Another cool thing about this robot kit, is that if you get bored with the leg mechanism, you can remove them and replace with wheels. All you need to do is create hubs that can attach to the crank arms. I have used this kit as an inspiration for a scaled-up all aluminum 6 legged walker using the same crank arm style transmission. I will be posting it up soon.
Really nice kit for hexapod starters. I probably will purchase one myself.
I recently bought a more complicated hexapod from http://robofac.com/shop/hexapod/deep-invader-hexapod-kit/.They provide free shipping and the kit is complete.
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