My senior design team used wire-wrapping to assemble our custom circuits. The circuits were all controlled by a microcontroller equipped with IoT capabilities, known as the Particle Photon. In order to control the motors, we used an H-Bridge powered by the L293D chip.
We uploaded an algorithm to the Photon that would allow traversal of terrain through tacking step by step. By alternating which motors retracted the spools, linear motion could be achieved!
There was a long iterative design process that was conducted, after calculations were performed. The calculations were designed to determine the size of the struts according to an optimization algorithm