Kinematic Analysis And Motion Control Of A Hexapod Robot

Robotic manipulators are very common for different robotic applications.Many researches were explaining the 3 DOF robotic manipulators which could be used as a leg of the hexapod.Similar to arm manipulator robot,using two or three revolute joints could determine the direction and movement with forward and inverse kinematics analysis.This paper took the kinematics robot manipulator with three degrees of freedom that could be used as a leg of the hexapod robot as the research object,analyzed and studied the forward and inverse kinematic to the robot manipulator and carried out the experimental verification based on a typical experiment platform of the hexapod robot similar to phoenix hexapod from lynxmotion with three degrees of freedom.Kinematics analysis is a basis of the study of robot manipulator.Through the Denavit Hartenberg parameters,the forward and inverse kinematic equations of the mechanical leg could be established according to the mathematical relationship between end-effector and joint angle.MATLAB and RoboAnalyzer were then to prove the forward and inverse equations.After finishing the mathematical kinematics,implement the inverse kinematic equations into the Arduino Mega 2560,the circuit processor board of the hexapod robot,to get the angle of each joint and send the commands to the servos.The tripod gait was introduced in this paper to perform the locomotion of the hexapod robot and ultrasonic sensors were deployed to realize obstacle avoidance.Simulation results show that the validity and feasibility of the kinematic analysis which introduced Denavit Hartenberg convention using MATLAB and RoboAnalyzer.Experimental results show that tripod gait locomotion is successfully implemented to the hexapod robot using end-effector position as the input.Additionally,ultrasonic sensors were successfully deployed to the robot and helped to avoid obstacles.