Crawling Robot

Aims

We’re going to build a crawling robot that’s inspired by a snake or a caterpillar but how does a crawling animal move? Click on the pictures below to view the video clips:

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BBC How Snakes Move

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Caterpillar on the move (Lampe, 2013)

Or this one:

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Hairy Caterpillar, Caterpillar Moving (HowToDrawCartoons, 2011)

You can see from the videos that a wave passes along the caterpillar so we’ll try to make our robot mimic that.

For this project, the robot we are going to build will only have 3 body segments, we’re going to need some power to move each segment and we will use a motor, called a servo motor to do this. We’ll control the motors using a program written on a micro:bit. In the next section, we’ll find out about motors.