Hexotica - The Design and Implementation of a Small Walking Robot

Conclusions and Recommendations

The robotic research platform that was created at the conclusion of this project provides an excellent basis for further study in the design and control of walking machines. The main difficulty encountered in the project was the leg design, which proved to be too weak to lift the body of the robot.

It is hoped that other students will continue this project in the future. Before beginning any new work on this project, it is essential that the control systems and the electronics in particular are fully understood. The electronics are extremely vulnerable and costly to replace, in terms of both time and money.

Recommended topics for future work are:

• Improve mechanical design of legs

The leg design uses three centralized motors to actuate remote joints. The choice of motors was originally based largely on cost, due to the limited financial resources available at the beginning of the project. The motors are too weak to lift the body of the robot. Also, the method of remote actuation of joints through a lead screw takes up a large amount of space. The ground clearance of the robot could be improved by redesigning this actuator.

• Add sonar sensing array to robot

In order to function in the real world, the robot must have some sense of its environment. Sonar is a popular method of providing mobile robots with rangefinding capabilities, and a large amount of information is available on how this can be done.

• Reduce power requirements of robot by redesigning leg actuators; reducing the size and number of devices in electronic systems

The current requirements for the robot are currently not known, but they exceed 3A in continuous operation. Due to the small size and payload capacity of the robot, this current requirement can not be provided by batteries (the batteries would be too large), so the robot must be tethered.

• Implement fuzzy logic / neural network / AI control paradigms to walking problem

A human operator currently does high-level control of the robot. To make the robot truly autonomous, some other control method must be implemented. The control hardware is capable of supporting all of the software control methods mentioned above.

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