Stefan Mileschin

Back at New York MakerFaire 2012, we noticed an amazing little steampunk quadruped robot walking around in the crowd outdoors. The robot was amazingly well executed, and had a unique ability to draw children over with it’s puppy like animations. It turns out this is [Drew’s] Little Walking Robot (AKA Puppy Bot).

Puppy Bot has actually been around for quite a while. He was born from the spare parts [Drew] had left over after competing in Robot Wars and Battlebots. The robots in these competitions were often controlled by Radio Control plane or car transmitters. Most of these systems are sold as packs for an RC car or plane. In addition to the transmitter and receiver, the pack usually included a battery and 3 or 4 servos. Standard RC servos were much too weak for use in battle robots, so they remained in his parts box.

On what [Drew] calls a slow weekend, he started putting the servos together, and ended up with a basic robot that could crawl around the room. After that the robot took on a life of its own. [Drew] improved the battery system, and added a microcontroller to automate the various gaits and animations. He brought the robot along with him to one of his battlebot competitions, and it took home the “Coolest Robot” award – even though it wasn’t actually competing!

The robot’s first major public outing was at GenCon 2005, where the crowds loved it. In the years since, [Drew] has continued to iterate on puppy bot’s design. He has come up with several specific goals which he outlines in his blog. Among them are Crowd-friendliness, Ease of repair, and Simplicity. All these goals grew from experiences he had while repairing and upgrading Puppy Bot. We think these goals, and [Drew's] entire blog are a great source of information to any aspiring robot builder.

http://hackaday.com/2013/10/18/quadr...8Hack+a+Day%29