Week 1: Project Ideation

ASSIGNMENT

Plan and sketch a potential final project.

THE PLAN

I’ve always been fascinated by animal anatomy:

Comparison of human and flamingo leg anatomy — Us if we were flamingoes, probably

As of more recently, I’ve also been getting into the study of mythological creatures. For my final project, I would like to make a wearable centaur mechanism that gives us the best of both worlds: freeing our bodies from the labor of bipedal walking, while keeping our nimble hands that are awesome for tinkering with stuff.

To make my preliminary sketch, I studied some centaur drawings:

Anatomical study of a centaur — this one captures the anatomy pretty well. The most noticeable difference from regular human anatomy is that the front legs start much further down — I will have to think of how to adapt this in the final design.

and also took inspiration from Theo Jansen’s leg mechanisms, which he used to make his Strandbeests:

Theo Jansen's Strandbeest leg linkage — what a beauty!

The nice thing about this linkage is that it has a very organic gait, unlike simpler ones that travel in a circular/oval pattern, which would lead to a very bumpy ride. One of my goals for the final project is to figure out how to design a linkage of my own similar to this one, and possibly have slight variations between the front/back legs.

Path traced by the Jansen linkage over one rotation — the path traveled by the Jansen linkage in one rotation

The next challenge would be connecting all four legs by some mechanism that would make sure they move properly in relation to each other.

Reference on quadruped gaits — This was a nice brush-up on animal anatomy. Did you know that cats and camels (among some other animals) don’t do this when they walk?

The basic movement mechanism seems fairly intuitive: a crank on each side to control one front + back leg, powered by rotational actuators. The two of them would be offset by half a rotation to ensure a trot-like gait instead of a gallop, so that I could perform a walking motion while standing in the final centaur build.

Sketch of the crank and leg linkage arrangement

From what I can foresee, one of the greatest challenges will be in adapting the Jansen linkage inspiration into my own design (which hopefully looks more like a horse than a Strandbeest) while adding extra aesthetic components, e.g. the centaur’s lower ribcage. Another task I will have to spend a lot of time experimenting with is having this mechanism hold its own weight and balance, AND also eventually holding mine. I’ve had way too many incidents of my creations tipping over and destroying themselves from unevenly distributed weight, and I would prefer if that didn’t happen while I was standing inside one.

Regardless, this is my preliminary sketch of what the whole project might look like:

Preliminary sketch of the full wearable centaur

Looking forward to improving it over the next few weeks!