Excel Drives Hexapod Robot

This is a couple of years old, so it's not news, per se... but it's news to me...

The Phoenix is a hexapod robot which uses off-the-shelf electronic components (servos, controller and bluetooth interface). The body of the Phoenix seems tobe custom made but I can't confirm that for sure from the post. The bot talksto the computer via bluetooth and the Visual Sequencer software.

The really cool part of this robot to me is that it uses Microsoft Excel to doall the Inverse Kinematics (IK) calculations for the robot's movements. It'sall based on Excel sheets and macros written in VBA. BTW, IK is the process ofdetermining the attributes of a jointed flexible object in order to achieve adesired position, or, in short, it's a type of motion planning.

Here are some links:

• The Hexapod Robot Kit
• Forum article with videos
• The Excel workbook that drive the bot