A Sound-activated DIY Biped Robot With a Lego-compatible Parts

Robotics has become a popular topic among children in the last decade. It has helped many children to learn essential skills such as critical thinking and coding, which are vital for most job opportunities in the next decades. Ever since robotics came along in the early 50s up to this date, humanoid robots have been extremely popular among other robots. The primary purpose of building a humanoid robot is to stand on two feet and mimic the human walking style, which is an extremely challenging task.

In today's tutorial blog, we are going to build a humanoid walking biped robot using lego-compatible building blocks in the Cherry Tart pack. This robot can move its feet and walk straight using only a single motor.

LEGO-compatible building blocks

Cherry Core (Sound-activated electronic board)

LEGO-compatible DC Motor

When we walk, we follow a periodic sequence of actions. Lifting one foot, moving it forward, putting it down, and repeating this sequence for the other foot. Our sequence is slightly different from the human natural walking sequence. What biped does is that it leans on one side and puts its weight on one foot, causing the other foot to get off the ground slightly, then it moves the hanging foot forth and repeats this sequence for the other foot. Something like a penguin.

Cherry core is the primary power source of our project. One of the cool features of Cherry core is that it has an onboard microphone that detects sound impulses. Clapping hands or snapping fingers are the two potential sources of sound impulses that stimulate the Cherry core, which increases the toy's interactivity for kids. With each impulse, Cherry core slightly turns the motor for a short period of time so kids can control how fast their biped is going by clapping faster or slower.

The following instruction provides step-by-step how-to assembly instructions to build this project.