Alt-BEAM Archive
Message #13909
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13915 Tue, 06 Nov 2001 12:09:47 -0700 keep alive message: a couple of BIOBug observations alt-beam@yahoogroups.com "John A. deVries II" The paths that the legs of the different BIOBugs take are really
quite different as well. I remember that the old "thought" for
walkers is that one pair of 'legs' was used for thrust where the
other was used for lift & a part of a good design solution depended
on getting the angles and throws of these to work together well. I
think Dave might have characterized these differences somewhat, but I
don't recall in what message. What would be interesting is to figure
out what the differences actually imply for the different bugs.
The second thing that caught my eye is something no one seems to have
commented about. The nose section of the different bugs provide
differing amounts of "protection" (wrong word, but close) to the
front antennae. In fact, the green bug has essentially nothing to
the sides of its antennae (except the legs) whereas the yellow bug
has pretty long "guards" on the left and right. One place that I can
think that would make a difference is when the bug rams into
something like a thin column that would catch between the leg and the
body -- once the bug began doing its back-up and turn-away sequence,
the antennae of the green bug is probably going to hit the column far
sooner than the yellow sort. This, in turn, is going to change the
back-up and turn-away behaviors.
So... even ignoring the "programming" (however it is actually
handled, whether by true emulation of nervous nets in a state machine
or cheapie microcontroller) the physical differences in the robots
ought to have pretty definite effects on their behavior.
Your Friendly Hogfather
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