Micro-Motor Based Bipeds

On LUGNET Technic Forum there was a friendly competition to see who could make the smallest (or lowest part count) two-legged walker. The walker posts were gathered by the moderator into a single web page. The smallest count was something incredible like 5 (see Shorty). It was amazing.

All the bipeds were overlapping footprint designs. I perfer to make weight shifters (or Center of Gravity) shifters, so I decided to try to revive the biped momentum by working small COG shifters.

I was motivated by Max Pihlstrom's BipEdd a compact micromotor based biped leading to uCOG (micro-motor center of gravity shifter).

uCOG was kinda ugly and gangly with those huge feet, so I worked on an improved model. I was able to put the micro-motor inside the body of uCOG II, which allowed for slightly smaller feet.

I realized that if I lengthened the torso, the stride would not be so dramatic, so I was able to further reduce the stride I could use even smaller feet.

Then James Loewen came up with Mighty Mite 2. I was inspired by the compactness of his design. The scale was much smaller than uCOG III. "Borrowing" some of his techniques, I came up with uCOG IV.

I felt as though I could further reduce uCOG IV, and came up with uCOG V.

I can't see how to eliminate any pieces from uCOG V, so I decided I was done mutating this design. I created building instructions in a single image using LPub 2.2's new callout mechanisms.

I realized that uCOG V was minifig scale, so I added a minifig and some controls and voila! Isn't it cute!

I decided to use parts from the new Star-Wars At-ST Mini set and decorate uCOG V as an AT-ST. Kinda silly.

Then I decide to see just how strong the micromotor was, and I came up with my best looking AT-ST yet.