Designing the legs of a hexapod robot

Abstract

For a hexapod robot type that was developed in our laboratory, this paper presents several aspects of construction and performance of its legs, all identical. The main issues included in this paper are related to the following: the CAD model with some essential design parameters that has been made to build all the six legs, workspace analysis obtained for the leg (through Matlab modeling and highlighting its extreme points), kinematic models of the leg (the direct model and the inverse model of the leg, for constructive data set used) and the dynamic model of the leg with several simulations (performed in Matlab and SimMechanics) for different cases of possible leg movements. The end of this work presents a number of simulation regarding the trajectory for the leg tip (liner and spatial curved line) and errors measurement between desired and real leg tip trajectories. The issues presented in this paper were subsequently integrated into the construction and control of the physical hexapod mobile robot.