Publication: Bio-inspired drive system
Date
2008-05-01
Authors
Thong, Wai Ling
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Abstract
As we all know, automated system are becoming more and more influencing in our daily life, ranging from every day uses devices and industrial machine such as washing machine, pick-and-place machine and etc. The important of automated machine such as robots became more significant when the reputable company like Honda created Asimo while Sony created Aibo. From what we have all seen here, we know that most of the robots are tend to mimics the locomotion of biological livings such as human, insects and animals. For example, Asimo was designed to mimics human while Aibo was designed to mimics dog behavior and also locomotion system. The use of bio-inspired locomotion system can be apply on various field such as military, underground sewerage system inspection, industrial machine, daily life and entertainment. The objective of this project is to produce a limbless bio-inspired drive system. Therefore, a snake like robot was developed in this project in order to produce the sine-wave movement that mimicked the locomotion of the biological snake without the use of legs or limbs. This project was divided into three main parts which are system simulation, hardware construction, and also program writing. The system simulation was implemented using Matlab while the hardware implementation included the system’s body construction and controller circuit construction. PIC-Basic Pro programming language was used to program the PIC 16F877 in order to control the nine servo motors of the system in order to create the locomotion. The main problem that occurs in this project is that the system cannot moves forward while producing the sine wave pattern as expected, this was caused by the lack of friction between the wheels that attached to the system and the floor surface. The situation was improved by making some modification on the wheels to increase the value of friction created. In a nut shell, the result of this project is satisfactory as the sine-wave pattern locomotion of biological snake was successfully mimicked.