Our Cricket Robot now can walk, sing 4 different songs, be controlled by an Sony IR remote to perform its tasks.
Walking Part: The Cricket Robot although can walk, but it doesn't go straight forward. This is probably due to some problems associated with the mechanical parts. We don't have much time to make a fine tune. It can walk faster if the state transition time is reduced. We are not very interested in making the fastest Cricket Walking Robot, so we are satisfied with its current speed.
Chirping Part: The Cricket Robot can sing 4 different songs. A song is generated by toggling PORTC on Timer1 CompareA on match ISR. Timer1 ensures cycle accuracy, so it gives pretty good burst frequencies. What could be improved is to generate sinewave cricket songs. If given more time, we could have implement natural cricket songs. It would be interesting to compare the digitally generated songs with the real ones.
Remote control: The remote controlled performance observed is about 95 %, as sometimes the IR detector is blocked by servo wires, or by other parts of the circuit. But the overall performance pretty good..
Usability: At present the Cricket Robot has two operation modes, Autonomous and Remote-Control. An autonomous Cricket with proper sensors could be developed to perform tasks in hazardous environment. For example,. it could be used to detect toxic gas concentration like H2S, to monitor radioactivity, or even to measure the oxygen level in the confined space. A walking robot like our Cricket one we built could be used to perform many tasks in many situations in real life. But our Cricket? it's just for fun.