Glad everything is working now, I hope your servo survived!
On the ATMega168 Timer0 and Timer2 are both 8-bit timers, so it doesn’t make much of a difference which one you use to generate your servo signals, unless you want to use the other one for some other purpose in your code.
And since you asked…
As for the snake robots, I’ve actually worked on two different projects, both with university robotics labs, so I can’t take all the credit. Well, actually one is a snake robot project and one is a serpentine robot project. As we define it, a snake robot moves only by changing it’s shape (i.e. slithering, undulating, etc…) while a serpentine robot has some other means of locomotion, like wheels, legs, or in this case, tracks. Both types have advantages and disadvantages, but they’re both totally cool.
So, the website for my old snake robot project (still going on though) is here:
Modular Snake Robots (ModSnakes), Biorobotics Lab, Carnegie Mellon University
These robots are actuated entirely with hobby servos, but don’t let that fool you, they have some huge achievements. ModSnakes were the first snake robots to climb vertically inside a pipe, then later the first to climb vertically wrapped around the outside of a pipe. They have other neat tricks like climbing stairs, striking across wide gaps, and even swimming!
The video website for my current serpentine robot project is here:
OmniTread Serpentine Robot OT4, Mobile Robotics Lab, University of Michigan
This guy is really sweet. It has pneumatic joints (rigid when you need to cross gaps, compliant when you need to go over uneven terrain), and it’s covered in moving tracks, all driven by one central motor through a flexible drive-shaft spine. It can do neat things like climb up stairs/pipes too, and it can get through crazy obstacles, across wide gaps or over objects many times it’s own height. One of the OT4’s even has hobby servos in it, controlling the flipper tracks.
It’s really interesting to have worked on both projects, since they’re somewhat opposite approaches to robots with similar applications (industrial inspection, search & rescue, etc…). Also, it shows you can do some amazing things with hobby servos!
-Adam