''A six-legged walking robot should not be confused with a Stewart platform, a kind of parallel manipulator used in robotics applications''. Beetle robot

A hexapod robot is a mechanical vehicle that walks on six legs. Since a robot can be statically stable on three or more legs, a hexapod robot has a great deal of flexibility in how it can move. If legs become disabled, the robot may still be able to walk. Furthermore, not all of the robot's legs are needed for stability; other legs are free to reach new foot placements or manipulate a payload. Many hexapod

robots "\n\n\n\n\nThe robots exclusion standard, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or simply robots.txt, is a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the site they are allowed to visi ...

are

biologically Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...

inspired by

Hexapoda The subphylum Hexapoda (from Greek for 'six legs') comprises most species of arthropods and includes the insects as well as three much smaller groups of wingless arthropods: Collembola, Protura, and Diplura (all of these were once considered ins ...

locomotion Locomotion means the act or ability of something to transport or move itself from place to place. Locomotion may refer to: Motion * Motion (physics) * Robot locomotion, of man-made devices By environment * Aquatic locomotion * Flight * Locomo ...

– the insectoid robots. Hexapods may be used to test biological theories about insect locomotion, motor control, and neurobiology.

Designs

Hexapod designs vary in leg arrangement. Insect-inspired robots are typically laterally symmetric, such as the RiSE robot at Carnegie Mellon. A radially symmetric hexapod is ATHLETE (All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer) robot at JPL. Typically, individual legs range from two to six degrees of freedom. Hexapod feet are typically pointed, but can also be tipped with adhesive material to help climb walls or wheels so the robot can drive quickly when the ground is flat.

Locomotion

Most often, hexapods are controlled by gaits, which allow the robot to move forward, turn, and perhaps side-step. Some of the most common gaits are as follows: * Alternating tripod: 3 legs on the ground at a time. * Quadruped. * Crawl: move just one leg at a time. Gaits for hexapods are often stable, even in slightly rocky and uneven terrain. Motion may also be nongaited, which means the sequence of leg motions is not fixed, but rather chosen by the computer in response to the sensed environment. This may be most helpful in very rocky terrain, but existing techniques for

motion planning Motion planning, also path planning (also known as the navigation problem or the piano mover's problem) is a computational problem to find a sequence of valid configurations that moves the object from the source to destination. The term is use ...

are computationally expensive.

Biologically inspired

Insects are chosen as models because their

nervous system In biology, the nervous system is the highly complex part of an animal that coordinates its actions and sensory information by transmitting signals to and from different parts of its body. The nervous system detects environmental changes ...

are simpler than other animal species. Also, complex behaviours can be attributed to just a few neurons and the pathway between sensory input and motor output is relatively shorter. Insects' walking behaviour and neural architecture are used to improve robot locomotion. Conversely,

biologists A biologist is a scientist who conducts research in biology. Biologists are interested in studying life on Earth, whether it is an individual cell, a multicellular organism, or a community of interacting populations. They usually specialize in ...

can use hexapod robots for testing different hypotheses. Biologically inspired hexapod robots largely depend on the

insect Insects (from Latin ') are pancrustacean hexapod invertebrates of the class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body ( head, thorax and abdomen), three ...

species used as a model. The

cockroach Cockroaches (or roaches) are a Paraphyly, paraphyletic group of insects belonging to Blattodea, containing all members of the group except termites. About 30 cockroach species out of 4,600 are associated with human habitats. Some species are we ...

and the stick insect are the two most commonly used insect species; both have been ethologically and neurophysiologically extensively studied. At present no complete

is known, therefore, models usually combine different insect models, including those of other insects. Insect gaits are usually obtained by two approaches: the centralized and the decentralized control architectures. Centralized controllers directly specify transitions of all legs, whereas in decentralized architectures, six nodes (legs) are connected in a parallel network; gaits arise by the interaction between neighbouring legs.

List of robots

* Hexbug (insectoid toy robot) * Stiquito (inexpensive insectoid robot) * Rhex * Whegs * LAURON

References

External links