Horse Air Powered Leg (Study 03)
After building various prototypes in the form of a horse leg, This one was made of wood with a pneumatic cylinder actuation.
Now it was time to animate it. This required accurate timing to modulate the joints of the leg in a lifelike way.
At first I made a control valve system triggered by moving fingers of one hand in the brass rings shown. Each finger works a different joint except the hoof and fetlock which were linked together.
It was like learning a new musical instrument. I had to teach myself the finger motions to get it to look right.
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Later, I made a computer servo controller (shown below) to simulate the finger movements.
This was unsatisfactory due to the serial nature of the computer controller.
What I needed was parallel processing to motivate multiple joints simultaneously.
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