Back by popular demand (you know who you are)... another Jansen linkage, in a shiny Makerbot friendly edition (some assembly required, your mileage may vary, multiple prints required).

This one uses TBuser's pin library v2. I added the file for convenience but its origin is thingiverse.com/thing:10541.

The pins break too easily, even when the linkage is big (and that's why its still a thing in progress). I toyed with different pin designs without success. Then I started using acetone... and it got messy so I want to avoid it.

I'm thinking about printing the pins separately using a different orientation (a nice feature of the pin library). Any suggestions?

Theo Jansen warns us that the Strandbeests reproduce by seducing people to create them. I'm a victim, and this may be contagious.

See Jansen Walker

This is a complete two-leg walking mechanism of Theo Jansen.

To build a complete walking Robot, you'll need this Thing 4 Times and some Construction for the two Motors and Control of them.

robotics engineering project

An openly designed Creative Commons Licensed robot.

Note: New Version (Beta 2.1) posted 06/05/2009

New features: 12 legs instead of 8, "drop-in" center platform, 1:1.8 ratio gears, many small changes.

I only update this listing for major revisions of the walker, it's possible there's a minor revision posted at my site that is not here: 4volt.com/projects/jansen/

What you see here is the Jansen walker, a laser-cut robot, based on the Jansen Mechanism. It has 12 legs and scuttles similar to a crab walking sideways. The brain is a Arduino, and the legs are powered by 2 micro-servos modified for continuous rotation.

This project is heavily influenced by Theo Jansen's natural gearing mechanism, it’s a very efficient mechanical leg design for converting rotary motion into leg movements, and is very elegant in my opinion. The basis is the relative distance of the 12 joins, Jansen calls them "The 12 Holy Numbers". The numbers were developed with a genetic algorithm. In a couple of interviews that he wrote the evolver on a Atari STe computer and it took literally months of 1990’s processing power to find the solution.

For more info on Theo Jansen as well as some video and pictures see strandbeest.com.

I've marked this as non-commercial creative commons licensed, but it would be very easy for anyone get me to license a commercial version to almost anyone. For the most part I would just like to make sure I agree with the usage, and make sure I am aware of it.

See vimeo.com/4221721 for a video of the motion.
The home for this project is 4volt.com/Projects/Jansen/

Also, if you don't have a laser cutter, but would like a set of laser cut parts for this project see: 4volt.com/donate.aspx#jansen