Circuit Lake

Electronic Project and Circuit Collection

Crawling Robot

08/20/2010 Category: AVR, Microcontroller, Project, Robotic

The SNAKY project goal is to build a robot moving around using the same crawling principle of a snake. This ‘fun robot’ is made with a set of thirteen articulated sections and the angle between each pairs of sections is driven by a servo motor (so twelve motors), simulating the muscles of the snake. Each section have wheels in order to limit the friction on the ground but these wheels are free-running only : Motors are undulating the snake, not turning directly the wheels.

snake-robot


Snaky also includes an ultrasonic sensor providing two features : automatic activation and simple collision avoidance. The project consist of a powerful ATmega88 AVR microcontroller from Atmel, twelve miniature servo-motors and a few other components.

snake-robot-head

On the software side the most CPU intensive section is the PWM generation, as 12 PWM signals are generated with a resolution of 20µs and a quite high pulse refresh rate. To achieve this target an innovative firmware architecture is implemented, managing two PWM channels at a time. This interesting robot project is designed by Robert Lacoste from France.

Snake Robot
Project Detail and Documentation
circuitcellar.com