Probabilistic Roadmap Method and Real Time Gait Changing Technique Implementation for Travel Time Optimization on a Designed Six-legged Robot.

This paper presents design and development of a six legged robot with a total of 12 degrees of freedom, two in each limb and then an implementation of 'obstacle and undulated terrain-based ' probabilistic roadmap method for motion planning of this hexaped which is able to negotiate large undulations as obstacles. The novelty in this implementation is that, it doesnt require the complete view of the robot's configuration space at any given time during the traversal. It generates a map of the area that is in visibility range and finds the best suitable point in that field of view to make it as the next node of the algorithm. A particular category of undulations which are small enough are automatically 'run-over ' as a part of the terrain and not considered as obstacles. The traversal between the nodes is optimized by taking the shortest path and the most optimum gait at that instance which the hexaped can assume. This is again a novel approach to have a real time gait changing technique to optimize the travel time. The hexaped limb can swing in the robot's X-Y plane and the lower link of the limb can move in robot's Z plane by an implementation of a four-bar mechanism. A GUI based server 'Yellow Ladybird' eventually which is the name of the hexaped, is made for real time monitoring and communicating to it the final destination co-ordinates. 1