Here is my hexapod walker. I wanted to try something different than a car, so I made a big killer spider instead The base is made with the blender addon. It can walk with a LUA script, and in fact it can be driven. I guess that means the AI can drive it too. But it has a top speed of around 1kmh.. lol Just something fun and different.. I will make a mesh and stuff for it later on
This one has wheels at tip of legs: If I would have more energy, I would attempt building something of such, but lately I have been mostly very tired, so it takes long time to even finish one of my current projects.
That's probably more logical but hey, it's cooler to have it walking Not yet no, so far I'm just trying to improve its walking. The overall thing is pretty light, it's got 10kg per node, so idk, it probably weighs about as much as a car? Plus the tips of the legs are quite stiff right now so it doesn't get a lot of grip since it bounce off the ground quite abit. I think it might need some feet suspension to gain better grip. The walking animation is also done with a basic trigonometry cycle so it won't adjust for ground irregularities and stuff. I made it because I've had the idea in my head for a while to make some non vehicle contraptions. There is limit really to what you can make, so I thought it would be a fun thing to try out Ty for comments.
Oh yes, walking thing is way cooler and I think also more difficult to make For suspension, one way could be to have leg setup like in not so great movie Wild Wild West: Those rotating joints would allow you to place damper and spring beams there. Another way could be to set some slidenodes and dampers. Also for grip, you can have node material rubber and um kind of triangle on tip of your current leg, like red in pic, then use beams with similar properties as steering limiters (yellow) to limit how much that red triangle thing can tilt: Yellows need to be on all nodes of triangle (or why not square) that is the 'shoe' so that way it does not tilt too much and I guess technically you would build some suspensions to those beams connecting nodes touching ground and your leg. There are of course limits of what one can do, but I have noticed that in BeamNG there are some solutions that are really different that one would first think, but then they open again so many doors of possibilities that there seems to be quite little limits at the end. If/when Blender importing of jbeams will happen some day, that will be finally opening lot of doors to me and certainly for many others, to work on contraptions that exceed what we think being possible today. It is then much closer to be virtual lego, but with less limits. Add few thrusters and it can do a backflip and even more, you can even have body made so that you can use hydros to bend it (some slidenodes, tow hook nodes to lock mechanism etc.), which would then allow climbing quite steep walls, with racing slick rubber parameters it would have all the grip ever needed I guess? Also one thing worth mentioning are rotators, those can add quite a new angles to any design! ( Was there a pun somewhere? ) I guess it is safe to mention at this place there is quite a lot of all sort of contraptions which I have planned, hopefully in a future I can get more of those done with my limited attention time span.
The shoe idea is pretty good ye, i've thought about that to give it some more contact area. Also the suspension I have in mind is a bit more simple, just a bit softer beams leading down to the tip of the foot to give it a bit of a softer impact. Also, fun fact, the programming of hexapod behavior is already pretty developed by various people. Here is a video of a real one with the same articulation as mine. It would be fun to implement all this movement, but idk how to go about that lol. This one uses inverse kinematics, which means that the program can know where the foot is located based on all the angles of the leg.
Any robotic movement program should work quite well with BeamNG as long as you have similar mechanics. Problem is translating it to LUA as some things are quite bit different in BeamNG Lua than what you would do with robotics toolkits (not sure what there is today, I remember Microsoft robot toolkit, but I think it kinda died really long time ago). Hydros are bit like linear actuators, servos can be rotators, I think there was some electric motor type, like servo, but can't remember that now and failed in searching. Anyway, as this is simulation of physics, all balancing challenges are same as in reality, which make this sim really really good for robotics simulation, if something works in reality, it probably is possible to make in BeamNG, but indeed it takes quite bit of work to figure out that all and especially LUA is somehow quite difficult to approach, at least for me. I really like your construction as it is exactly what I think this game needs more, creative robot contraptions, that certainly is where this game could be really good. Not sure if devs are going to make BeamNG.Robotics, but I find this could be best robotics simulator out there as this one has real world physics + you can actually have lot of fun with robotics in this game, now what would be point of robot without destruction? Slidenodes could be useful for simple suspension, center of leg beam could be slidenode's rail and then rest of beams could work as a damping, it could limit flexing that softer beams might introduce, but perhaps flexing is not too bad, that is fun part testing different solutions!
