Author Andrei
30/03/2019
I, personally, was waiting for this project for some time. I saw his work a few months ago. Carl Bugeja is behind this idea and he first designed the coil legs. Running current through these coils and having a magnet below, it will make the leg to vibrate and by switching multiple legs, you could make the robot move. Now, he finally placed a Bluetooth receiver on top of the flexible PCB and this BT module is also a microcontroller so it could be programmed. He made a few tests where he oscillates the ooils at different frequencies and see the results. The main problem he had was the weight of the battery. He had a small battery but the current discharge of that was too low. The weight in this type of project is crucial.

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In the photo above, as you can see he also designed a very fine PCB as the frame of the robot. The PCB is very, very, thin. This frame will support the neodinium magnets and also connect to the flexible pcb. The flexible board is the brain. It has the power circuit and the bluetooth module and microcontroller. The coils are the legs of the robot and those will vibrate on top of the magnet.

Once he used a different battery he mannaged to move the robot at different frequencies. It seems that it was skipping some steps but it is a good start. Having multiple robots as this one, talking one with the other using Bluetooth connection would be great to see.

And that's it. As you can see by oscillating the robot legs, it can move in different directions. Is not yet perfect but it's a good start. I'm sure Carl will solve the weight problem and improve this a lot. Can't wait for a future version with more improvements. I hope you like this kind of posts.

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