Biomimetic small walking machine

The goal is to design and construct a biologically inspired, small, robust, and fast walking machine. This paper explains how two important observations from cockroaches can be employed as design guidelines to design and build small walking machines. The first observation is the fact that cockroaches use very little feedback and control results from the properties of their parts and their morphological arrangement. This observation leads to our hypothesis that a robust and simple electromechanical walking machine should have implicit feedback control only within its hardware. The second observation is that the optimal walking frequency of a cockroach is close to the natural frequency of the cockroach. This observation leads us to hypothesize that the walking frequency of an electromechanical cockroach also needs to be the natural frequency of the machine. These two design guidelines do not dictate any architecture for an electromechanical cockroach. An architecture that involves the mimicking of the trajectory of a cockroach\´s footpath was arrived at later in the design process. Two small 4-legged walking machines (HEL-Roach I and II) are built to verify the hypotheses. The first machine (3"×5.25") weighs 0.7 lb and can travel with a speed of 3" per second. The second machine (2"×1") weighs 0.17 lb and its speed is 5" per second