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Building a Robot Dog (with an airsoft gun)

48 points| eschluntz | 4 months ago |erikschluntz.com

12 comments

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eschluntz|4 months ago

Blog post about my mechanical design, robot math, stress testing, and competition for "Mech Warfare", a small airsoft-only battlebots competition this summer

gertlex|4 months ago

OP getting this robot working in about 3 months was insanely impressive.

- guy whose back yard the scrimmages took place in

djmips|4 months ago

Excellent write-up. This is one of those side projects that has been on my list since forever and this seems about the level of accomplishment and tech that is within reach. Good effort! I'm looking forward to further refinements.

gertlex|4 months ago

Having had a chance to read more of the blog now, maybe the most pleasing part is your similar discovery of, "I'm writing my own kinematics, and generating plots of it is the fastest validation of that code". I did similar matplotlib plots of my quad (spider) leg movements years ago. Definitely need to do more of that when I finally revisit the software on my mech from 2019 with AI help :).

And more generally, yeah, having the AI manage some of those plotting needs will be fantastic in other work too; I enjoy figuring out what to plot, and don't mind wrangling and hand-refactoring said scripts... but it's so time consuming historically, and there's always the itch to urgency to get back to the "main code". (at least I learned to gradually convince peers that often plot scripts should be commitable without being polished; they're a form of documentation sometimes!)

apeters|4 months ago

* Z3l3nsky joined #mechwar

* Z3l3nsky slaps eschluntz around a bit with a large trout

<Z3l3nsky> @eschluntz pm

That happened.

flemhans|4 months ago

Any plans to release the files or a build guide?

eschluntz|4 months ago

Yeah if there's more interest I can publish the GH and onshape! I just need to sanity check that I didn't leave any keys in it or anything...

GenericDev|4 months ago

I absolutely hate this. Great to the OP for amazing work, but I am so sad that we're living Black Mirror dog world instead of Star Trek equality world.

There needs to be a new word for when you're impressed, but so depressed at what is being achieved.