Development and walking experiment of hexapod robot HITCR-I

Developed in this paper is a hexapod robot HITCR-I to implement the free walking of hexapod robots on unstructured terrain. In the investigation, first, the structure of robot leg based on four-bar linkage mechanism is designed to realize an omnidirectional motion. Next, in order to further improve the motion performance of the robot, an expression describing the global flexibility of the robot is constructed and is applied to the optimization of structure parameters. Then, based on the idea of function-behavior-integration, the control objective is planned, and a motion controller is constructed. Moreover, by combining the trajectory planning suitable for the leg motion on unstructured terrain and the generation of free gaits based on local rules, effective and steady walking of the robot is achieved. An experiment is finally carried out to verify the walking ability of robot HITCR-I on unstructured terrain.