การออกแบบโปรแกรมสำหรับการคลื่อนที่หุ่นยนต์หกขา

Abstract

Multi-legged robots are complicated in the sense of motion planning as they can have many gaits of movement. In general development, robot gait generation replicates the nature as it is deemed as the optimum way to traverse in terms of energy efficiency. However, for research it is interesting to explore unconventional ways even it is not selected by natural beings. This project aims to design a program for motion of hexapod robots (six-legged robot). There are two modes of motion: standing and walking. In the standing mode, the robot can move its body positions and orientations in six degrees of freedom. In the walking mode not only is the robot capable of imitating several natural gaits such as tripod, wave, amble, ripple, and bipod, but also it is able to traverse in these gaits while there exist a body twist (yaw) and/or tilt (pitch, roll). The height of it's body relative to the ground can also be adjusted. A small hexapod prototype was constructed, and a program was developed for microcontrollers that control the robot actuators. The user can control the robot through a remote control to vary the velocity in all six degrees of freedom of the body. The robot can respond to a sudden change of direction from the user. From the test in case of no slippage the robot can travel forward with the maximum velocity of 0.347 meters per second in Tripod gait and rotate with the maximum angular velocity of 0.82 radians per second in Bipod gait. The program developed in this project still has limitation as it cannot reverse the leg movement patterns when the user commands a reversed direction. This causes the leg placement planning to have relatively short strides which affects the maximum speed capability. This limitation should be the main point of focus in the future development.