A Performance Oriented Novel Design of Hexapod Robots

This paper presents a novel hexapod robot with legs radially free distributing around the body. Compared with radial symmetric or rectangular symmetric robots, the legs of a radially free distributed hexapod robot can rotate around the body of the robot and redistribute their positions thanks to the proposed radially free distribution mechanism. To investigate the performance of the designed robot, the kinematic reachable workspace is analyzed in the three-dimensional coordinate system and enlarged due to the redistribution mechanism, and then an analysis on the fault tolerance and stability of the robot is addressed to verify the effectiveness of proposed radially free distribution mechanism in theory. Further, several comparative experiments are conducted to examine the superior performance of the proposed hexapod robot in stability, climbing, and energy consumption. The results show that the hexapod robot with radially free distributed legs can improve various performance indexes when it lifts weight or walks on slope.