Reconfiguration of a climbing robot in an All-Terrain Hexapod Robot

Abstract

This work presents the reconfiguration from a previous climbing robot to an all-terrain robot for applications in outdoor environments. The original robot is a six-legged climbing robot for high payloads. This robot has used special electromagnetic feet in order to support itself on vertical ferromagnetic walls to carry out specific tasks. The reconfigured all-terrain hexapod robot will be able to perform different applications on the ground, for example, as inspection platform for humanitarian demining tasks. In this case, the reconfigured hexapod robot will load a scanning manipulator arm with a specific metal detector as end-effector. With the implementation of the scanning manipulator on the hexapod robot, several tasks about search and localisation of antipersonnel mines would be carried out. The robot legs have a SCARA configuration, which allows low energy consumption when the robot performs trajectories on a quasi-flat terrain.