NATURAL MACHINE MOTION  INITIATIVE

The most common locomotion vehicles use wheels in order to perform their tasks. They can achieve high speed and they need a quite simple control, but they require particular terrain’s conditions.
Currently there is a demand for exploration and operation in uneven and un-structured terrain, thus other type of vehicles need to be employed.

Legged systems perform well in these cotexts.
In particular, hexapod robots are able to move on any kind of surfaces due to their flexibility, indeed each leg can be arranged according to the terrain’s level change ensuring the desired orientation of the body.
Hexapod robots can overcome obstacles comparable with the size of the ma- chine leg and compared to the other legged robots hexapod robots have the static stability as a structural property.

The ”Hexa-bot” consists of a central body with six legs attached to it through flat flange. Each leg has two ”qbmoves maker pro” and one ”qbmoves advanced” as joints. (Due to the high torque required to the second joint of each leg). The first joint fixes the position of the leg on the (x − y) plane, the second and the third do the ”swing-stance” phase on the (x − z) plane.

The actuators are connected by the C-flange and the last one is attached to a custom paw. Every leg is position-controlled separately using a simple PID controller, its trajectory is computed via inverse kinematics starting from a desired path in the cartesian plane.

Notice that, two battery pack are needed to supply the whole robot and two USB connections are needed to control it.