Nick Donaldson is a systems engineer and programmer hailing from Winchester, UK, and now based in San Francisco. In his leisure time he builds robots. Pretty amazing ones. Since 2004, his multipods Ziggy and Flik have taken home a dozen medals in the RoboGames Walker Challenge event, in which contestant ‘bots have three minutes to autonomously navigate a 1m × 3m obstacle course strewn with junk, then climb a set of steps.
Shown here is his latest creation, Glider, a six-legged linear-frame walking machine with cleverly designed forelegs featuring conventional rubber feet as well as wheels (which are off-the-shelf inline skate parts) mounted at an interior angle. The robot can thus configure itself for rolling or walking by the simple expedient of changing its stance.
You can check out more of Donaldson’s work onine at gotrobots.com.
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