More Theo Jansen, plus another dude

Has anyone been able to work out the geometery of the legs used by Theo Jansen's robot legs yet?

I had a go at it with a Lego set but could not get it to work.

Also, has anyone (except Jamies brain) worked out how the robot changes direction so smoothly?

 

Is he nuts?! "Let's spend a year playing with electrical tubing"? Dude, you have a perfectly good job. You don't give up stuff like that for tubes!

Living on a mountain? No road to your place! Sure you could construct your own road! But by hand?! Are you nuts? Airplane hangar as a robotlab. Come on! Get real!

Trying to explain robots in a voice only botcast.... Nuts!

Website community? Nuts! You won't have a life left for hobbies. Period.

Robot in your basement big enough to throw your kids around, your wife even? YOU ARE NUTS TOO!

IR sensitive Aardvark? Those are nocturnal you Nutter! Will never operate during the day!

Legged robot, OK, but PLYWOOD?!?!?!

Nuts you are! All of us!

 

From what I could gather... imagine 2 wheels, one above the other, with a vertical beam with pivots on the face of the wheels such that when the wheels turn the beam goes up and down forward and backward. A horizontal plate is stuck on the bottom of the beam with a free spinning joint.

This whole assembly is fixed dead center inside the head. The head is stuck to the lower body with a big bearing but nothing else.

The ends of the legs are connected with ball joints to the horizontal plate, and also up the leg a little with a swinging arm to the lower body. The swinging arm can connect up to the ceiling, or down to the floor of the body. Alternate the legs and you have 2 sets of 3.

 

It really is a fascinating mechanism. I looked at his spider walker a long time ago and sketched out the mechanism for 3 legs. Trying to draw in the other 3 legs would have made it unreadable. I`d like to try to reproduce it but I never have found the time.