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Quadruped Spider Robot

A four-legged walking robot built from scratch, evolving from an Arduino RC prototype to a Raspberry Pi Pico-driven platform with inverse kinematics.

Project Overview

This was my first robotics project, started in November 2020: a four-legged (quadruped) robot designed, wired, and coded entirely from scratch, using trigonometry and kinematics to translate leg-angle math into coordinated walking gaits.

V1 – Arduino Prototype | V2 – Raspberry Pi Pico

The V1 quadruped robot on a desk, wired to its RC receiver and servo driver

V1: Arduino RC Prototype

The first version ran on an Arduino with a 16-channel PWM servo driver, an nRF24L01 radio module for RC communication, and an 18650 Li-ion battery. It focused on validating wiring, RC communication, and basic body/leg motion functions such as walking and posing.

V2: Raspberry Pi Pico Upgrade

As the project’s computational needs grew, I moved the “brain” from Arduino to a Raspberry Pi Pico for significantly more processing headroom, adding an MPU6050 gyroscope for orientation sensing and driving 12 SG90 servo motors across the four legs, still communicating over nRF24L01.

Watch the V2 walking demo

Schematic of the V2 quadruped: Raspberry Pi Pico driving twelve servos, an MPU6050 gyroscope, and an nRF24L01 radio

Technical Details

  • Trigonometry and inverse kinematics were used to compute leg positions for stable multi-legged locomotion.
  • Custom PCB and protoboard wiring for power distribution and servo control.
  • Supporting tools, like a dedicated Servo Tester, were built alongside the robot to debug servo calibration issues.

What Came Next

This lineage continued into a third generation, the ROS2-based Quadruped Robot, which rebuilt the same walking-robot problem around ROS2’s node architecture on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W.

References