With the hardware for all four legs gathered, I have assembled the first standalone version of the quadruped. The MakerBeam XL aluminium profiles were adopted as before, to create a temporary chassis.

The fact that the robot can now stand on its four feet meant I could quickly give the walking gaits a test on the real hardware: The Python test software reads the up/down and forward/back position of each leg for a number of frames that make up a walking gait, the IK is solved, and the resulting joint values are streamed via serial over to the Arbotix-M, which simply updates the servo goal positions. No balancing or tweaking has been done whatsoever yet, which is why in the video I have to hold on to the back of the robot to prevent it from tipping backwards.

A chance for some new photos:

I took some time to make a video of the progress so far on this robot project:

Finally, here is an older video showing the Xbox One controller controlling the IK’s foot target position, and a simple serial program on the ArbotiX-M which receives the resulting position commands for each motor (try to overlook the bad video quality):

In the next stage I will start building the robot's body, as per the CAD design, which is for the most part 3D printed parts and aluminium sheets, combined with the 2 DoF "spine" joints.