Head and Tail

The Objective

Of course we wanted our Robo Dog to look a bit more dog-like than a box on legs.

But adding a head and a tail also had more practical reasons: In a bigger model, the up-scaled head and neck would house antenna components. The tail would then work as a counterweight to keep Robo Dog in balance.

Designing the Tail

The design started by building the negative of the receptor on the body, in the same fashion as the recptor itself and with an offset of 0,2mm to ensure a sliding connection after printing. This is also where a small compartment was added to house weights for adjustable countering of the weight of the head.

Core to the tails design is a simple fit point spline. The form of the tail was then modeled by extrusion, taper, chamfer and fillet operations.

Designing the Head (and Neck)

The head is a three part design, wich also started by building the negative of the receptor on the body, but a neck to go over the receptor was needed, to make the components in the head accessible even after assembly and to create more room.

The neck was created by extrusion of an oval sketched around the connector. The connector was then used to make the cut out for the friction-fit connection. At last the neck was hollowed out by negative-extrusion of a smaller oval.

Like the tail, the head is based on a fit point line sketch. This sketch was also modeled into a head by the same operations, as the tail. It was connected to a slightly lager cylinder for a friction-fit connection to the neck, wich can additionally be secured with two pins. Then the shell operation was used to hollow out the head, making space for antennas in a bigger model.

At last a fit point spline sketch of an ear was made, mirrored and then modeled like the tail and the head. And a cable pass-through to the main body was negative extruded through the neck and connector.

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