The goal of this project was to study bio-inspired locomotion system on uneven terrain. I wanted to understand the underlying principle of locomotion system designed by nature. The robot was a hexapod with 3 DOF legs actuated using 18 RC servos. 6 force sensors were mounted under the feet to detect ground contact. The control command was sent from a laptop running MATLAB.

The algorithm that was used to control this walker is bio-inspired. A neural oscillator network has been used to generate periodical reference motions for the legs, by tuning the parameters, the gaits varied from tripod to wave gait. Currently, the oscillators work without sensory feedback from the force and tilt sensors. I'm going to investigate other controllers that will involve sensor information, such as reflex based control and hybrid controller.

Movie:

Hexapod first demo run: