ABSTRACT

As the wheels are ineffective on rough and rocky areas, therefore robot with legs provided with Klann
mechanism is beneficial for advanced walking vehicles. It can step over curbs, climb stairs or travel areas
that are currently not accessible with wheels. The most important benefit of this mechanism is that, it
does not require microprocessor control or large amount of actuator mechanisms. In this mechanism
links are connected by pivot joints and convert the rotating motion of the crank into the movement of
foot similar to that of animal walking. The proportions of each of the links in the mechanism are defined
to optimize the linearity of the foot for one-half of the rotation of the crank. The remaining rotation of
the crank allows the foot to be raised to a predetermined height before returning to the starting position
and repeating the cycle. Two of these linkages coupled together at the crank and one-half cycle out of
phase with each other will allow the frame of a vehicle to travel parallel to the ground. This project is
useful in hazardous material handling, clearing minefields, or secures an area without putting anyone at
risk. The military, law enforcement, Explosive Ordinance Disposal units, and private security firms could
also benefit from applications of mechanical spider. It would perform very well as a platform with the
ability to handle stairs and other obstacles to wheeled or tracked vehicles.

The goal for this project is to create an eight-legged robot to test new walking algorithm. We loosely
based our design on spider because there has an advanced way in robotics on octopedal locomotion.
Hopefully algorithm develops will be of use to robotics community and in future society.
TABLE OF CONTENT

1. Introduction

1.1 Why Klann Mechanism?

1.2 Background

1.3 Origin

1.4 Burmester Curve

1.5 Overview

1.6 Objective

2. Literature Survey

2.1 History of legged mechanism

2.2 Existing design of the leg mechanism

2.3 Mechanical design of quadruped robot

2.4 Theo Jansen mechanism for climbing over bumps

2.5 Under water autonomous walking robot

3. Mechanism

3.1 Overview

3.2 Klann mechanism

3.3 Jansen linkage mechanism

4. Design and Calculation

4.1 Calculation of dimension of linkage

4.2 Testing of dimension

4.3 Calculation of degree of freedom 4.4 Calculation of dimension of gear

4.4.1 Gear nomenclature

4.4.2 Calculation of dimension of larger gear 4.4.3 Calculation of dimension of smaller gear

4.5. Determination of dimension of base plate

4.6 Design of parts and assembly

4.6.1 Leg

4.6.2 Assembly view

5. Components
5.1 Frame and base plate

5.2 Aluminium bars

5.2.1 Properties of Aluminium

5.2.2 Advantage of Aluminium

5.3 Electric motor

5.3.1 Features of the electric motor

5.4 Gears

5.4.1 Plastic gear material

5.5 Shaft

5.6 Legs

5.7 Linkage

5.7.1 Klann linkage

5.8 Control system

5.8.1 RF Transmitter

5.8.2 RF Receiver

5.9 Batteries

6. Fabrication

6.1 Soldering

6.2 Drilling

7. Construction and working

7.1 Construction

7.2 Working

7.3 Analysis

8. Merits of mechanical mover

8.1 Merits of Klann mechanism 8.2 Advantage of Klann mechanism

9. Cost estimation

10. Conclusion

11. Bibliography
11.1 Reference

11.2 Websites
CHAPTER-1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Why Klann Mechanism?

The main advantage of Kann mechanism robots is their ability to access places impossible for wheeled
robots. By copying to the physical structure of legged animals, it may be possible to improve the
performance of mobile robots. To provide more stable and faster walking, scientists and engineers can
implement the relevant biological concepts in their design. The most forceful motivation for studying
Klann mechanism robots is

• To give access to places which are dirty.

To give access to places those are dangerous. Job which are highly difficult legged robots can be used for
rescue work after earthquakes and in hazardous places such as the inside of a nuclear reactor, giving
biologically inspired autonomous legged robots great potential Low power consumption and weight are
further advantages of walking robots, so it is important to use the minimum number of actuators. In this
context, an objective is set in this project to develop an eight- legged mobile robot whose structure is
based on the biomechanics of insects.

1.2. Background

Since time unknown, man's fascination towards super-fast mobility has been unquestionable. His never
ending quest towards lightning fast travel has gained pace over the past few decades. Now, with every
passing day, man is capable of covering longer distances in relatively shorter duration of time. Today's
automobiles are beasts on wheels which are designed for speed and comfort.

However, most of today's automobiles are limited to roads or plain terrains. Even the off-road vehicles
are of no use when the land is too rough. Needless to say, no vehicle can climb mountains.

This is because all automobiles depend on rubber wheels which fare better only on roads, Man, who
himself depends, on legs can travel on rocky terrains and climb mountains, but such journeys are never
comfortable.

Thus naturally the solution can be seen as an automobile which rests on and moves with legs. Simple, it
may sound but the problems in building a working model are many. The most trouble some part is
powering the gait of the legs. Rotation of wheels in wheeled vehicles is powered by an engine or electric
motors. Unlike wheels, legs move in an acute reciprocating movement. This is practically tough.

This is where Klann Mechanism pitches in. It converts rotary action directly into linear movement of a
legged animal. Vehicles using this mechanism can travel on any type of surface. Also, they do not require
heavy investments in road infrastructure.
1.3. Origin

The Klann linkage is a planar mechanism designed to simulate the gait of legged animal and function as a
wheel replacement. The linkage consists of the frame, a crank, two grounded and two couplers all
connected by pivot joints. It was developed by Joe Klann in 1994 as an expansion of Burmester curves
which are used to develop four-bar double-rocker linkages such as harbor crane booms. It is categorized
as a modified Stephenson type III kinematic chain.

The proportions of each of the links in the mechanism are defined to optimize the linearity of the foot
for one-half of the rotation of the crank. The remaining rotation of the crank allows the foot to be raised
to a predetermined height before returning to the starting position and repeating the cycle. Two of these
linkages coupled together at the crank and one-half cycle out of phase with each other will allow the
frame of a vehicle to travel parallel to the ground.

The Klann linkage provides many of the benefits of more advanced walking vehicles without some of
their limitations. It can step over curbs, climb stairs, or travel into areas that are currently not accessible
with wheels but does not require microprocessor control or multitudes of actuator mechanisms. It fits
into the technological space between these walking devices and axle-driven wheels.

1.4. Burmester Curve

Burmester theory is named after Ludwig Burmester (1840-1927). Burmester introduced geometric
techniques for synthesis of linkages in the late 19th century. His approach was to compute the geometric
constraints of the linkage directly from the inventor's desired movement for a floating link. From this
point of view a four-bar linkage is a floating link that has two points constrained to lie on two circles.

Burmester began with a set of locations, often called poses, for the floating link, which are viewed as
snapshots of the constrained movement of this floating link in the device that is to be designed. The
design of a crank for the linkage now becomes finding a point in the moving

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floating link that when viewed in each of these specified positions has a trajectory that lies on a circle.
The dimension of the crank is the distance from the point in the floating link, called the circling point, to
the canter of the circle it travels on, called the center point. Two cranks designed in this way form the
desired four-bar linkage.

This formulation of the mathematical synthesis of a four-bar linkage and the solution to the resulting
equations is known as Burmester Theory. The approach has been generalized to the synthesis of
spherical and spatial mechanisms.

1.5. Overview

It is the fact that the wheels are ineffective on rough and rocky areas. Therefore vehicle with legs
provided with Klann mechanism is beneficial for advanced walking vehicles. It can step over curbs, climb
stairs or travel areas that are currently not accessible with wheels. The most important benefit of this
mechanism is that, it does not require microprocessor control or large amount of actuator mechanisms.
In this mechanism links are connected by pivot joints and convert the rotating motion of the crank into
the movement of foot similar to that of animal walking

The proportions of each of the links in the mechanism are defined to optimize the linearity of the foot
for one-half of the rotation of the crank. The remaining rotation of the crank allows the foot to be raised
to a predetermined height before returning to the starting position and repeating the cycle.

This project is useful in hazardous material handling, clearing minefields, or secures an area without
putting anyone at risk .The military, Explosive Ordinance Disposal units, and security system could also
benefit from applications of mechanical spider. It would perform very well as a platform with the ability
to handle stairs and other obstacles.

1.6. Objective

Our project, "Design and Fabrication of Mechanical Mover using Klann Mechanism", is to demonstrate
the working of Klann Mechanism through a simple walking robot. A normal robot (or vehicle) can move
only forward and backward direction. By using Klann Mechanism the vehicle can able to move in one
plane along different direction. The movement of the kinematic linkage is done by the use of electric
motors.

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CHAPTER-2
LITERATURE SURVEY

2.1 History of Legged Mechanism

The scientific study of legged locomotion began just very a century ago when Leland Stanford, then
governor of California, commissioned Edward Muyridge to find out whether or not a trotting horse left
the ground with all four feet at the same time. Stanford had wagered that it never did. After Muybridge
proved him wrong with a set of stop motion photographs that appeared in Scientific American in 1878.
Muybridge went on to document the walking and running behavior of over 40 mammals, including
humans. His photographic data are still of considerable value and survive as a landmark in locomotion
research. The study of machines that walk also had its origin in Muybridge's time. An early walking
model appeared in about. It used a linkage to move the body along a straight horizontal path while the
feet moved up and down to exchange support during stepping. The linkage was originally designed by
the famous Russian mathematician Chebyshev some years earlier. During the 80 or 90 years that
followed, workers viewed the task of building walking machines as the task of designing linkages that
would generate suitable stepping motions when driven by a source of power.

Many designs were proposed but the performance of such machines was limited by their fixed patterns
of motion, since they could not adjust to variations in the terrain by placing the feet on the best
footholds. By the late 1950, it had become clear that linkages providing fixed motion would not suffice
and that useful walking machines would need control.

Computer control became an alternative to human control of legged vehicles in the 1970s. Robert
McGhee's group at the Ohio State University was the first to use this approach successfully. In 1977 they
built an insect like hexapod that could walk with a number of standard gaits, turn, walk sideways, and
negotiate simple obstacles. The computer's primary task was to solve kinematic equations in order to
coordinate the 18 electric motors driving the legs. This coordination ensured that the machine's center
of mass stayed over the polygon of support provided by the feet while allowing the legs to sequence
through a gait. The machine traveled quite slowly, covering several yards per minute. Force and visual
sensing provide a measure of terrain accommodation in later developments.

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The hexapod provided McGhee with an excellent opportunity to pursue his earlier theoretical findings
on the combinatorics and selection of gait The group at Ohio State is currently building a much larger
hexapod (about 3 tons), which is intended to operate on rough terrain with a high degree of autonomy.
Gurfinkel and his co-workers in the USSR built a machine with characteristics and performance quite
similar to McGhee's at about the same time. It used a hybrid computer for control, with heavy use of
analog computation for low-level functions. Hirose realized that linkage design and computer control
were not mutually exclusive. His experience with clever and unusual mechanisms he had built seven
kinds of mechanical snakes- led to a special leg that simplified the control of locomotion and could
improve efficiency. The leg was a three dimensional pantograph that translated the motion of each
actuator into a pure Cartesian translation of the foot.

With the ability to generate x, y, and z translations of each foot by merely choosing an actuator, the
control computer was freed from the arduous task of performing kinematic solutions. The mechanical
linkage was actually helping to perform the calculations needed for locomotion. The linkage was efficient
because the actuators performed only positive work in moving the body forward. Hirose used this leg
design to build a small quadruped, about one yard long. It was equipped with touch sensors on each foot
and an oil-damped pendulum attached to the

body. Simple algorithms used the sensors to control the actions of the feet. For cleared the obstacle, the
cycle would repeat. In 1994 Joe Klann developed a six linkage mechanism to replace the wheel And this
mechanism was called Klann mechanism which is further expansion of Burmester curve.

2.2 Existing Design of the Leg Mechanism

For legged robots, 2 DOF is the minimum required to move a leg forward by lifting and swinging. Figure
shows the leg mechanism, using a Watt-chain six-bar mechanism to imitate the cockroach (insect) leg.
We chose a six bar mechanism because of its superior force- transmission angle and bigger oscillating
angle in comparison with other types such as the four- bar mechanism (Norton, 2004). Force
transmission is very important for leg mechanisms, because of the point contact with the ground. The
leg mechanism itself has one DOF for lifting. whilst the base of mechanism has another DOF for
swinging. The leg mechanism, with its body size shown in Figure 1, is modeled with Solid Works. It has
six links and seven cylindrical joints. The body size and link dimensions are determined from the
maximum swing and lift angles. Each link is created by entering its shape and reference coordinates. To
mate the contact

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surfaces of the parts, the assembly bar of the assembly mating menu is used. Then the component is
rotated around an axis, specifying the desired axis and rotation for the selected surfaces.

2.3 Mechanical Design of a Quadruped Robot

It is a quadruped, electrically actuated, walking and wall climbing robot. The trunk consists of one part
only, and the legs are mounted, symmetrically, on the corners of the trunk. Each leg has three links and
three actuated joints connecting these links. Hip horizontal joint is used to swing the three links of the
leg in a plane parallel to the ground while walking hip vertical joint, to attach-detach the foot on and
from the terrain for swing and support stages. respectively.

2.4 Theo Jansen Mechanism for Climbing over Bumps

Transporter vehicles have traditionally used wheel Mechanisms like cars and trains. Wheels are ideally
suited for movement without vertical fluctuations of the body, and tires with inner rubber tubes absorb
shock from a rugged road. On the other hand, biologically-inspired robotics learn mobile flexibility from
the morphology of multiple legs and their coordination .Good examples of this are arthropods, like
spiders, and the robots are conventionally designed with actuators placed in every joint. In such
implementation, robots are good tools to investigate how an animal moves, but they are unable to be a
substitute principle for wheels because they don't much take into account the maximum load capacity.
Joint's actuators promise mobile flexibility, while the Actuator's torque performance impacts on the
toughness of the robot's body. Therefore, in the design of disaster robots, which need to move on rubble
and carry rescue devices, continuous tracks or crawlers are popular. Theo Jensen a Dutch kinetic artist
who has attempted to create a bridge between art and engineering by focusing on biological nature,
proposed a linkage mechanism to mimic the skeleton of animal legs. This is called "Theo Jansen
mechanism," and provides the animal with a means of moving in a fluid manner. Interestingly, his
artificial animals require no electric power for actuators, and do work by weak wind power to drive the
gaits of multiple legs through a transformation of internal cyclic motion to an elliptical orbit of the legs.

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2.5 Use of Klann mechanism in underwater autonomous walking robots

A low-cost, biologically inspired underwater walking robot has been designed and built to covertly
explore the seabed and to determine properties of submerged objects in obscure and inaccessible
underwater locations. Adopting legged locomotion for traversing the seabed has a number of
operational advantages; firstly, the platform can maintain its position without expending energy,
secondly, the typically unstructured terrain of the sea bed can be scaled efficiently, and thirdly,
movement generates a low acoustic signature which, for applications such as mine clearance or littoral
Warfare would be beneficial.

2.6 Summary of Literature Review

Literature review reveals that Klann Mechanism robots have ability to access places which are impossible
for wheeled robots. By copying to the physical structure of legged animals, it may be possible to improve
the performance of the mobile robots. By implementing relevant biological concepts in the design, more
stable and faster walking robots could be developed. Based on the results of literature review, an
attempt is made in this project to develop an eight legged Klann mechanism spider robot.

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CHAPTER-3 MECHANISM
3.1. Overview

A six bar linkage is a one degree-of-freedom mechanism that is constructed from six links and seven
joints. An example is the Klann linkage used to drive the legs of a walking machine. In general, each joint
of a linkage connects two links, and a binary link supports two joints. If we consider a hexagon to be
constructed from six binary links with six of the seven joints forming its vertices, then, the seventh joint
can be added to connect two sides of the hexagon to forming a six-bar linkage with two ternary joints.
This type of six-bar linkage is said to have the Watt topology.

A six-bar linkage can also be constructed by first assembling five binary links into a pentagon, which uses
five of the seven joints, and then completing the linkage by adding a binary link that connects two sides
of the pentagon. This again creates two ternary links that are now separated by one or more binary links.
This type of six-bar linkage is said to have the Stephenson topology. The Klann linkage has the
Stephenson topology.

The common mechanisms used in kinematic leg movement are Klann linkage mechanism and Jansen
linkage mechanism. Both will operate in a single plane provided a constant axle height. use only pivot
joints and the rotating crank for input.

3.2. Klann Mechanism

The Klann linkage is a planar mechanism designed to simulate the gait of legged animal and function as a
wheel replacement. The linkage consists of the frame, a crank, two grounded rockers, and two couplers
all connected by pivot joints.

The proportions of each of the links in the mechanism are defined to optimize the linearity of the foot
for one-half of the rotation of the crank. The remaining rotation of the crank allows the foot to be raised
to a predetermined height before returning to the starting position and repeating the cycle. Two of these
linkages coupled together at the crank and one-half cycle out of phase with each other will allow the
frame of a vehicle to travel parallel to the ground.

The Klann linkage provides many of the benefits of more advanced walking vehicles without some of
their limitations. It can step over curbs, climb stairs, or travel into an area that are currently not
accessible with wheels but does not require microprocessor control or multitudes of actuator
mechanisms. It fits into the technological space between these walking devices and axle-driven wheels.

16

3.3. Jansen Linkage Mechanism

The foot of a walking mechanism is the part of the mechanism that comes in direct contact with the
ground as indicated. As the crank turns, the foot traces out a cyclical path relative to the body of the
walker, this path is known as the locus. A crank based leg system with the foot, locus, and crank labeled.
The direction of movement of the linkage to the crank and the foot through the locus are indicated.
Additionally, a fixed point in the linkage relative to the body of the walker is indicated with a black
square.

The locus can be divided into four parts: the support, lift, return, and lower phases. Throughout the
support phase, the foot is ideally in contact with the ground. During the lift the foot is moving toward its
maximum height in the locus. During the return, the foot reaches its maximum height off the ground and
moves in the same direction as the body of the walker. Finally, during the lower the foot descends in
height until it makes contact with the ground.

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