Structure Optimization And Control Of A Bionic Hexapod Robot With Visual And Auditory Sensors

The research of bionic six-legged robot has accomplish such a great progress in these years, but in terms of bionics, the existing six-legged robot has not shown the insects features of flexible movement capacity and high payload-weight ratio(the ratio of payload and its own weight), which seriously constraints the application and popularization of six-legged robot. Therefore, it is very important to improve the payload-weight of hexapod robots. On the other hand, the application of bionic six-legged robot also depends on the development of its intelligent control system, the current research on the intelligence of mobile robot mainly focuses on the wheeled robot, not on the hexapod robot.In this paper, I come up with a dynamics modeling method for hexapod robot with three degree of freedom legs, and try to develop a method to optimize the payload-weight ratio of hexapod robot by physical design. And after that, a prototype of six-legged robot was developed. STM32 series microcontroller was used to design the embedded controller of the robot, and a embedded real-time operating system, RT – Thread, is transplanted into the robot controller to improve its data processing ability. The robot communicates with PC through WIFI which is very fast and reliable. ROS(Robot Operating System) is applied on this robot. ROS is very popular in robotic industry in these years for its powerful open source algorithm to control robots. With the help of ROS, now I can control my robot with my voice, also, I can make it follower some specific objects.After the prototype has been developed, a lot of experiments have been conducted, including the basic movement ability experiment, voice control, object following, payload test and human following experiment. The experiments showed that the movement of the robot is very flexible and the control system is pretty successful. And the robot has a payload-weight ratio of 1.02. Of course, this is not the largest payload-weight ratio of the robot, if power supply capacity of the battery is improved, or a more suitable gait for carrying is used, the payload-weight ratio can be greatly enhanced.