VR_Dev

Thanks man. Nothing is tuned right now, so I'm sure with a little love it will be much better. I was gonna send the project out to you and ZodiusInfuser this morning but I remembered I have some file Paths hard coded I'm gonna need you guys to change. So I want that to be as easy as possible. I dont think its a lack of friction between the foot and the ground, as much as the foot bouncing off the ground. Like I explained in the IR next thread, the Servo Speed PID is responsible for slowing the foot down as it gets too the ground. If it hits the ground too hard it explodes, slightly to hard and it bounces back into the air, and if I turn the speed way down, the whole performance suffers. This is why I'm looking forward to trying to build suspension parts. So that the mech leg can hit the ground with some force, and not explode. This would also help increase ground contact. I'm going to draw the ground triangle a different color when all three legs have contact as opposed to just two. This should help debug maintaining ground contact throughout the translation forward. Thanks! I'm really happy with it. I do measure the ground every frame, but it could be done just on contact if need be without much change in performance. If it had to be on contact, I would just set the active balance target once contact was made, instead of throughout the whole stride. I have high hopes for turning. My initial thought is i will rotate a transform in unity that will be the desired vector. Then, if the difference in vectors is less then say 15 degrees, the bot turns the way I have now. Anything higher than that the bot will stop, rotate, then begin walking. Still long way to go on that and I'm out of town all weekend so prob no progress anytime soon. I've also thought about how easy it would be to make a few changes, and make this run stand alone in ksp. My method could be used for development of projects, then when they are done just a few changes will allow them to be run stand alone in ksp. I always thought one of these could get rigged onto an IRL foot.

Yeah that's definitely how it should be done. Didn't mean to start a whole suspension discussion. I assumed they fell under the Unity Joint umbrella and would be pretty straightforward to implement in this project. You stick with IR and I can look into suspension.

Why not just destroy the part when an outside force pushes it past its limit? That's what would happen in real life anyway. It would just mean you have one more realistic thing to consider when engineering robotic structures. Edit: Right after i posted this I realized if the limit where 60 and the servo were at 60, any tiny force would break it, which isn't what we want. I was only considering if the servo were at 30, and something forced it 30 degrees past its limit. The more I learn about the springy joints the more I understand why they don't exist yet. I'm committed to trying to figure it out though. Unfortunately I think the only option is to mess with the loading sequence however. Maybe the moduleLandingGear is the key. Having trouble finding documentation though. Also I'm curious as to their loading behavior. I'll take a look tonight how landing gear/wheels react on a flight state reload.

yeah ok I got it now I think. So at first launch it compresses itself to the correct position, but if you go to the space center and back to the vessel the compressed state becomes the new default. Do you know if it is specifically built in Unity or custom Ksp that controls this behavior? I'm pretty excited for this idea now. It would be amazing to have some damping when placing a mech foot on the ground. Right now the servo speed PID is the only thing that slows the foot down as it gets close to the surface. Too fast and the foot part just explodes on contact. But a suspension part between the knee and the foot to dampen the impact. That opens up a whole new world of performance.

Save damping value to a text file OnDestroy?

Couldn't it just be an uncontrolled extender with spring\damping?

What about straight up IR shock absorbers? Doesn't look like any mod currently exists and I think they would be super useful. I know I would have uses for them.

Well would you look at that. Just two weeks ago I was so bummed this configuration wouldnt work with the old servos. Dream come true. Thanks man. Works in combo with the old IR, just let it overwrite the files.

If you've never seen "Stop Making Sense" put it on your list

Hey that unity demo is awesome, way more complex then any of my arms. You could 100% control that from unity just like I do, you would just have to build the equivalent in KSP first. Also that IK info is super useful. My IK has a long way to go. I'm proud of it but I'm no mathematical genius. My IK code uses SOHCAHTOA, law of cosines, and simple logic for everything. It's way easier in Unity because you have built in functions for distance and angles. You don't need to calculate everything by hand. This is terrifying to me.

"What did you do in ksp for the last 48 hours straight while your girlfriend was out of town"

My gf was gone so I worked on this pretty much non stop over the weekend. (Also why the recording actually has sound). The hexapod now has full terrain mapping and navigation capabilities. Instead of using the vessel height to position the ground and foot targets, each foot target is now placed on the ground directly beneath it. Each hip target is now set according to the ground position of it't foot. There are two ways of setting the hip targets. Right now the hip targets are set at the average height of all the foot ground positions plus the target height. I've realized since recording the video it would be best to just set the hip targets so that the vessel is always the target height above the ground. Or some combination of the two. The first method helps going up hill, while the second is preferable for down hill. Also setting the hip height half way between the highest (foot ground + target height) and the lowest would be the way to insure each foot has the best chance of hitting it's target when going over extremely rugged terrain. The vessel also knows if it is traversing up a hill, is level, or traversing down a hill, and sets the color of the ground accordingly. Right now nothing changes according to that, but eventually the gait will respond to the different slopes. I tried taking it out to the mountains but I still need to find a way to orient the gyroscope to a level surface, even when the launch point is not level. The triangle begin drawn on the ground represents the leg group that is actually moving the hexapod forward. Building the terrain mapping box was pretty difficult, as there are 36 vertices being set each frame. It took a while but it was definitely worth it. Developing this process I found a couple of big mistakes in the gate code, which have now been fixed. The stride is now much smoother and more efficient than it used to be. I haven't done a top speed test yet after the fixes, but average speeds have picked up across the board. Still lots of tuning to be done. Next up is steering.

Yeah it would be nice if they were controlled. I guess I'm just interested in multi axis controllable servos for more compact designs. Anything that requires new models will be the most challenging however. I'm down to prioritize internal improvements. I've been meaning to take a look at the IR code, maybe I'll do that this weekend.

I know Unity and c#, and even how to rig models, but I'm no modeler either. So its a dead end there. I assume you've reached out to @ZodiusInfuser already? I tried to rig up what my idea for a ball joint would be. Essentially we just need a pivatron with a rotating base, as condensed as possible. Here are a couple ideas I found. Usually ball joints are not servos, but hey, thats what ksp is for. This is an interesting idea. Your standard ball joint. Think of how your shoulder works. And that's exactly what I mean when I talk about joint strength. If you look at the feet in my video, the blue ball is where the foot is according to the servo angles. The yellow circle you can often see is where the foot actually is. You obviously already understand this problem, and know how much worse it gets under heavy load.

Ball joints please. Has two settings, rotation and pitch. Stronger joints. I assume they just use Unity's joints, so not sure how much wiggle room there is there. Seconded on reverse servos and collisions. I'm down to help in any way possible, got the IK stuff going already.

So I finally got around to course correction while walking, which allowed the hexapod to walk the full length of the runway in about 15 minutes. I wrote some simple stride length adjustment code, which allows setting the desired stride length for both the right and left legs at the beginning of each stride. The actual steering is adjusted by a PID loop which decreases one side's stride length by a percentage of its default length. So my stride length is 2 meters, and the steering PID can shorten that by up to 5%. You can see in output log, at the beginning of every step cycle it prints the error, and what the stride is being adjusted by. Right now its just set to go straight, but when I start adjusting the launch vector, I will be able to control which direction the mech will travel. The stride length, PID settings, and max % can all be tweaked from my custom editor. I have been using it to do speed tests, which is why the rockets got lost. Next up is slope navigation. If you watch to the end of the video you'll see how great it is at it right now. One day I'll record with sound, but my gf and cats don't like the orchestra of IR servos moving. Steering GIf

I don't know anything about compiling languages down into virtual opcodes, but I am working on a technique to control KSP plugins from the Unity editor, using memory mapped files. I was experiencing lag using kRPC, so I decided to try and build a faster solution. I detail as much as I can in the thread, would love to chat with someone about getting mMap files to work in .net 3.5.

I updated the main thread with all my thoughts on this project. I will try my best to keep it updated as the project progresses. If anyone is interested in collaborating in development, or tuning/design of the mech's themselves, please let me know. I have a million ideas for this project, and I wont' be able to get to all of them by myself. There is also the potential for a real life counterpart. This is something I would definitely need help with, as my hardware skills. I am planing on buying a frame in the near future, and would love to have some help implementing my unity controller. Currently I am trying to get a demo release of the project. I have started writing a custom editor that will expose all the tweakable variables the mech uses. As well as a UI to track groundspeed. This will be important for tuning the craft for top speed. You can see that in this simple VR demo video I made. Eventually you will be able to manipulate the head and arm targets with the VR hand. My end goal is to be sitting in a cockpit, camera feeds as the cockpit windows, and the mech skeleton displayed on a dash in front of me. VR Gif

Love it. Nice flap work. I tried to build a f-35 out of all flaps one time but found them super hard to allign. This one looks fantastic, and has working wings to boot. I dig it

.net 4+

https://gfycat.com/HealthySplendidFishingcat There ya go. I dig it, I'd lose the nosecone, but thats just me.

https://gfycat.com/LeafySecondInganue

Keep an eye out. Trying to get it customizable for people to use on their own designs. Why don't you post a pic of your suit.

so this amazing @Colonel Cbplayer gfy really got me excited to go back to working on this guy. In terms of walking, I would like to build a quadrapod first, and develop some techniques for COM management. But in the short term I think I'll rig up the arms, so that I can control the mech in VR just like this iron man project i was working on. I am controlling the arm here with a touch controller. I also used to use custom PID to control the engine mounts, but I want to hook the IR straight up to the steeringmanager PID. So the IR engines would effectively work just like stock flaps. Nothing against Cbplayers transformer, but I would assume there is a fair amount of SAS controlling it. I would like the robotics to do all the work. The main problem with getting this guy to walk is going to be the lack of motion along its back. @ZodiusInfuser have you ever thought of some kind of ball joint?