Hexapod

This project was made during an international student engineering competition that took place in FabLab Polytech in Saint Petersburg.

The main goal of this project was to create an hexapod robot from scratch, that would be able to execute simple movements, and get familiar with industrial design techniques like milling, laser cutting, 3D printing and CAD design.

Step 1: Project Design

We chose a symmetrical hexagonal shape in order to make a robot that we could easily make moove in every direction, and big dimensions to work with more ease on the pieces.

Each leg has 4 degrees of freedom, the first bend on a vertical axis and the other 3 bends on an horizontal axis (photo 1), to give the robot a smoother movement and allow for more possible configurations, and is approximately 0,5 m long. The movement of each bend is controlled by a servo motor.

Step 2: Materials and Hardware

Materials:

• Main Body: wood
• Legs structure: aluminium
• Servo holders: ABS plastic

Hardware:

• Arduino UNO x1
• Servo motor MG996R x24
• PWM Controller (16 channels, 12 bits) x2
• Power Supply Unit x1

Step 3: CAD Modeling

Using SolidWorks we modeled the body, the legs structure and the servo holders in order to manufacture them.

We made different prototypes, you can see the wooden one and the final aluminium one in the pictures.

Step 4: The Math

Since we started this project from scratch we had to solve the Inverse Kinematics equations, those are needed to compute the movements needed to get a leg to a certain position.