Simple Hexapod

Now most of you reading this article might have seen robots or remote controlled vehicles that move using wheels because people generally build robots that run on wheels.

But sometimes the flexibility and agility achieved by having a few pair of legs on your robot really outweighs the simplicity of wheels.

So i finally decided to build a Hexapod. I had built some wheel based robots before, but building a hexapod was really a quite interesting job.

I was inspired to build this after i saw a video of Polulu Simple Hexapod walker, which i felt was like one of the quite simplest hexapods to built.

Below are some images of my little Hexapod.

   

My build structure and technique is nearly same as Pololu walker. A few differences are that:-

I used cycle spokes to build its legs instead of large size paper clips, because cycle spokes are undoubtedly more stronger in enduring the load before they bend and also easily available. 

And i used an Atmega8 micro-controller instead of the Pololu micro maestro to control the 3 servo motors to move its legs.

But Gait is same as that of Pololu walker. However i didn't get the time to develop the lateral movements i only wrote the code for Front and Back movements.

The connections are quite simple just simply choose any 3 IO pins as your servo control pins and connect the servo channels directly to those. 

To build it i just placed the servos together in position and glued (using hot-melt glue) and taped everything just to be sure. Then glued the legs (made by bending cycle spokes) to the servo attachment and then fixed it with the Servos.

I have written a software based servo control driver program for Atmega8 which can be adapted to build a Soft-Servo library for AVR micro-controllers. It just requires one 8-bit timer-interrupt. https://github.com/neutronstriker/TinyHexapod is the link to the code.

Here is my hexapod in action. 

So if you have any questions or ideas just leave a comment.