jelly fish

Jelly

jellyBot : Rolley (the second prototype)

Ok, so the proof of concept I worked on back in October looked awesome, but it couldn’t really move on its own… and there were a couple of reasons why: I had mounted standard servos on the drive shaft instead of the continuous rotation type. I found out you need more than a breadth of 180 degrees to make a rack and pinion move far enough to do anything useful! Also, my drive shaft needed some roller bearings to tension the rack down onto the pinion in order to stop all the slippage. Since both of these things involve the mount of the motors specifically, I took the time to completely redesign that whole part to be more solid in general… after all, it is the very core of the robot- therefore the most important part! Tighter tolerances = happy jelly. So what I ended up making was a set of brackets that both…

Jelly

My New jellyBot Prototype, Racky

  About a year ago I started building a robotic jellyfish inspired by Festo’s submergible AquaJelly. I was just beginning to figure out how to get the thing moving when I got sidetracked with the prospect of launching a Kickstarter campaign and dropped the project cold. During this whole long year while I’ve been fulfilling the said Kickstarter, this poor jelly prototype (“Boney”) has watched silently from a distant shelf in the workroom, begging me to pick it up again. Finally this weekend I was able to spend some time giving the old parts a makeover… in yellow. I added a nice gentle curve to the moving pieces, taking after the design of its cousins, the delta robots : Last year I decided to use a rack and pinion to get the parts to move in leu of Festo’s fancy linear actuator that they showcase in their model. Never having used, let alone designed a working rack…