BugBot Out On The Town

Bug Bot - A Cute Muscle Wire Bug That Crawls About

See BugBot Move on YouTube!   BugBot Video

A 4" long 6-legged radio controlled 'bug' was developed using only 'muscle wire' to move his legs.  This was a challanging project mostly from mechanical and electrical design perspective but he is still 'cute' more or less. 

This is my oldest electro-mechanical bot special care has been taken to make it's actual components be symmetric so that BugBot is as much a work of 'art' as an interesting electronic tiny device where the image of a bug was a big part of the goal.

Pic Microcontroller with it's digital and analog IO allows creators of electronic projects to make intellegent devices that are both low-power as well as low-cost.  

The 'Bot' devices described have been developed using the 'SourceBoost  IDE' which I cannot say enough good things about.    Projects typically use recent models of the Microchip Pic Microcontrollers  that  I have found to be full featured,  energy efficient, and very low cost.

BugBot is a 4 inch long  robot who uses  muscle wire on his legs and body to move.  He uses a Pic microprocessor to sequence his movements and his 'master' controls him via a radio control unit taken from one of the common 1.5 inch long radio controlled cars found on technical toy sites.  This little guy presented me with many mechanical as well as electrical problems mostly due to the constraints of working with a muscle wire and a 3.7 volt battery.   His body is 65mm long (2.5 inches) and the LiPoly battery he carries below his body only gives him 3.7 volts to then be used to drive about 200milliamps through the wires which heats them and causes the 5 percent contraction of muscle wire.    This little guy moves very slowly because each step moves about 3-4mm while taking a couple seconds due to heating and cooling speeds for the muscle wire.

BugBot