Experimental Platform for Hexapod Locomotion

This paper presents an experimental platform developed for hexapod locomotion analysis and experiments over common types of obstacles. The platform contains two elements: a model of a six legged mobile robot used for real tests on different obstacle categories and a software simulator interface which allows study of the robot stability in gravitational field, assuring in the same time the control of the mobile robot during real experiments. For the hexapod robot this paper presents our design for the leg, its kinematical model and workspace analysis. The control part is a combination between Matlab, a micro-controller based development board and dedicated servomotor controller board. The trajectory generator for the leg tip was implemented using piecewise cubic spline interpolation method. Finally, this paper presents some experiments on spiral stairs for which the locomotion sequences strategies were designed in order to overcome them using the following constrains: maintain the robot’s body parallel with respect to the ground and maintain the maximum height of the robot during locomotion.