Melanie v2.0 get the first position in the National Robotics Contest Hispabot 2004 celebrated in Alcala de Henares (Spain) on the 29th and 30th of April 2.004.

The robot, developed by Alejandro Alonso-Puig (mundobot.com) showed its capacity to take over its body a weight superior to 4 kg (the double of its own weight), to obtain sequences of manual movement by direct programming, or to walk by the generation of space coordinates with algorithms of displacement of waves combined with inverse kinematics. Additionally its capacity to detect obstacles by the measurement of the power consumption of its legs allowed her to walk on obstacles adapting the gaits to them. 

Their basic constituent characteristics are the following ones:

Mechanics

• 6 Legs. 3 degrees of freedom by leg
• Design of legs optimized to diminish consumption and to maximize power.

Electronics

• Servo control circuit of with management of speed, controlled via serial port
• I/O circuit, with 28 analog ports (A/D conversion) and 8 digital ones. All the chips are controlled via I²C bus .
• Measurement of the position of the 18 servos by taking the signal from its potentiometers.
• Measurement of the consumption of energy of the servos by measuring the voltage drop in resistance of ½ ohm.
• Battery for feeding of servos and second battery for feeding of the electronics

Programming

• Control from PC with Visual C++ application 
• Recording of sequences of movement by direct programming
• Generation of movements by displacement of three simultaneous waves and application of algorithms of inverse kinematics
• Detection of obstacles on the ground by detection of the variation in the current consumption and adaptation of the legs and trajectories to resolve it.

VIDEOS OF MELANIE 2.0

Melanie walking with 4kg over its body (MPEG 7Mb)	Melanie walking over rough terrain  (MPEG 7Mb)

Pictures and videos by: Alberto Sagredo Castro

mundobot.com