Anybody else wish they could built a battlemech?

[themadscientist]

Or a Gundam or whatever you want to call it; there are so many anime and science fiction iterations of giant robotic war machines piloted by people. I played a lot of Battletech as a kid and I always dug the idea of walking tanks crushing crap.



It's certainly a serious undertaking, but part of the problem that robotic devices have is having to make the device think and react on its own. With a pilot, a lot of that is no longer necessary as you have a human doing the thinking and essentially "driving" the machine with all the tech devoted to stabilizing the machine and turning the joystick and foot control inputs into physical responses from the machine.

Every now and then I get this feeling that I am a welder and some Google searching away from building a walking, fist swinging battle machine. Then I wake up and realize how phenomenally naive that is, what a jackass I sound like and I put the stopper back in the bottle of scotch.

Just for S&Gs, really, what are we talking about here?

1. Chassis. Pretty straightforward here, mimic the human skeleton and existing bipedal robot designs; no need to reinvent the, legs? See what I did there? no wheels so legs, huh? Cmon, that shit was clever. Nothing? Oh well, moving on. Make it out of simple DOM chromoly tubing with commercially available articulation parts like hinges and ball and socket joints from heavy equipment manufacture. Tab it to connect all the rams and parts that will bolt up to it and stick a cockpit in the thing at the top with a nice bucket seat on an air ride frame.
2. Movement. In the game, they used electrically-reactive fibers call myomar to mimic human muscle. Put a charge to it and it contracts. Pretty basic and somebody is probably working on it already, but I think properly arranged hydraulics with good computer control of the valving could effect locomotion and limb and hand articulation in an effective, but somewhat musclebound and notchy way. Good enough.
3. Power. Since the movement is hydraulically driven, not directly coupled to the engine, as long as the powerplant can drive the hydraulic pumps and the electrical generator it's good. Maybe a small diesel engine.
4. Balance. Obviously this thing is going to want to fall over every time it moves. It would need gyroscopic force to encourage it to stay up. I have zero knowledge of how to accomplish this. Other than those toy gyroscopes I'm lost. I'm sure it's an addressable problem, I just don't know how.
5. Control. Video games have demonstrated there are many schemes for controlling complex in game devices with buttons and joysticks so this is fairly straightforward within that context. Nerds are already doing stuff like this for video games. It should translate.

https://256.makerslocal.org/wiki/MechSim

[ScoobsMcGee]

Not sure how this has developed since, but I'll just leave this here: http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/07/tech/g...enge-accepted/

[justatroll]

I also played battletech in HS a LOT. I even wrote a program for the Apple II to help keep track of stats during gameplay. I also build NASA spacecraft for a living. So this is something I think about almost every day. You know me from a previous life - hint, good quote in your signature. Must be a smart guy. Wink wink

[Tcoat]

What do you mean "wish" I could?
World domination is just a servo away.
Was Ebay the right place to get my parts?
Should I have just paid the extra and had them overnighted from Japan?

[ajaxthebetter]

I used to play the hell out of Armored Core. Watched battlebots all the time. Got so into it as a young lad I got some large dowels and carved them into spikes and put them in the center caps of my RC car. Forget what the car was called, but it would flip over and had a rotatable arm that the wheels on one side were attached to. Spray painted it grey and blacked out its windows. Thought it was a true battle bot. Those were the days.

[Tectoniic]

FR-S > Battlemech for daily driving.

I'm definitely not working on a miniaturized nuclear reactor to power the 90 ton Mad Cat MkII that I keep hidden under my house, definitely nothing crazy like that going on.