Inchworm

On a flight to Boston, I figured out an important graphical technique for designing complex pneumatic circuits. I created asynchropillar. After asychropillar worked so well I got the idea to make an inchworm that used a traveling wave propagating down the body to walk.

The design of Inchwork is described by these pictures.

shows the basic idea of a given body segment of inchworm's 6 segment body. The table of 1's and 0's describe the sequence of pistons opening and closing.

converts the table of 1's and 0's to graphical form to make circuit analysis easier.

identifies the 6 synchronizing points in the sequence.

shows which synchronization points affect which pistons graphically.

shows the synchronization points that make each piston expand and contract.

Inchworm walks by sending a compressing/expanding wave from its tail to its head. Here is a 1.5M movie of one cycle of the contracting/expanding wave moving from tail to head. There is a second 1.5M movie that is zoomed into watch the few pistons that are involved in the wave at a given point in time. The final 754K movie of the whole body again. Inchworm Images