
Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped - ameschin
https://github.com/chinmaynehate/Venom
======
Torkel
It has the wrong kind of motors to be interesting. Servos are a dead end, imo.

The interesting robot projects now are the ones embracing brushless motors
with encoders and dynamic walking gaits. It’s the same components that are
used in drones.

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colordrops
Could you provide some examples of these projects?

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modeless
Stanford Doggo:
[https://nathankau.com/Research](https://nathankau.com/Research)
[https://github.com/Nate711/StanfordDoggoProject](https://github.com/Nate711/StanfordDoggoProject)

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daenz
A video of it in action:
[https://youtu.be/NFO0sFC34yE?t=112](https://youtu.be/NFO0sFC34yE?t=112)

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programd
Reminds me of Genghis [1], the granddaddy of walking insect-bots made by
Rodnay Brooks back in 1989. Brooks' robot had a vary cool approach to learning
to walk where he "removed all cognition processors from Genghis and left only
the sensors and the code/hardware to allow it to walk"

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_(robot)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_\(robot\))

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zxexz
Cool project! Code is quite easy to follow, IMO.

Somewhat off-topic, but I find the name somewhat amusing. I would never
seriously hold a name against a project, but I’m always curious when one is
named something a bit...edgy, without an obvious reason - and at the expense
of making it harder to find!

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TheSpiceIsLife
On the front page at the moment are projects named:

Bear - minimal blogging platform - it's a play on _bare_

Venom - all terrain quadruped - snakes are all terrain?

Zoox - self-driving-car tech - half the other self-driving-car companies have
nonsense names

Facebook - I still find this a smart name for the service

Looking Glass - 3D display - confused me for a second with
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Glass_server](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Glass_server)

Surfboard - audio feature extraction using ML - nonsense name

Plywood - cross-platform C++ framework - nonsense name, okay I sort of get it

I work in the steel fabrication / construction industry, so the material /
construction technology related names catch my attention a lot and I wonder
about them.

Naming things is _hard_. Naming things that didn't exist last week must be
even _harder!_

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0_____0
Meanwhile in hardware we're sitting around with German-esque word trains like
Multi-pixel photon counter (MPPC), successive-approximation to digital
converter (SAR-ADC), parallel-multidimensional digital signal processing (mD-
DSP).

It seems to be the software engineering world, out of all the engineering
disciplines, that loves to draw upon fanciful names the most.

I used to troll an old housemate who was in web frontend by making up
framework names. "Oh you're using Node.JS? Was talking to someone who's
migrating to Polenta, with Shibboleth on the backend." He never did quite
catch on.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
You’d have to be pretty quick off the mark to respond with:

 _Shibboleth?_ Isn’t that still in private beta?

~~~
0_____0
I realized after a while that any name I made up would invariably be an actual
JS package, perhaps even a full fledged framework. Shibboleth is in fact
v0.1.4, available via npm.
[https://www.npmjs.com/package/shibboleth](https://www.npmjs.com/package/shibboleth)

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Baaaaahaha

0_____0‘s Law of Software Framework Names

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jcelerier
this seems pretty much a copy of the Metabot:
[http://www.metabot.fr/](http://www.metabot.fr/) which is also open-source and
has existed for more than half a decade

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wlll
There are a whole load of very similar looking robots out there, an image
search for "quadruped robot" or "hexapod robot" will yield loads of them.

It's great that someone is getting into robotics, but this does have the vibe
of someone over-selling a hobby project.

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ObsoleteNerd
Yeah the front page definitely tries to sound like they just invented the
quadruped.

I’m all for people getting into robotics, but I’d much prefer a more
natural/honest intro to projects like this. “I saw all these cool quadruped
projects and wanted to make my own to learn more about them”.

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akhilpotla
Very interesting. This might have some military applications as well. Could be
used for recon footage in difficult environments. Such as, mountains and
deserts.

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ge96
what is "all terrain" eg. snow, I guess if the snow is packed

still that's an arm chair comment from me, I have not personally built my own
walking robot

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wlll
In this case I think it means "a slight incline"
[https://youtu.be/NFO0sFC34yE?t=111](https://youtu.be/NFO0sFC34yE?t=111) :)

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jytag
Nice project. The code is well written.

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aszantu
I want one to carry my groceries :D

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ebg13
Why does it move so slowly?

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ge96
probably because it's not using special brushless actuators rather regular
servos also the platform design does not seem fast eg. compared to the shape
of a dog or a human

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jcims
There are definitely faster actuators but I'd guess it's also the control
loop(s) filtering out transients from the stepping motion. The backlash in the
geartrain, flex in the body and gritty/chunky motion from the servos probably
makes a mess in a typical six axis imu.

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ge96
I guess what is "fast" though, I suppose it is not impossible for this
particular design(that looks like it would wiggle/swivel?) due to the
horizontal moving main joints. But I have not done calculations to prove
that(which would be faster horizontal or vertical swing)

edit: which is interesting arguable horizontal join/swing design is less work

