DESIGN OF HEXAPOD WALKING ROBOT BASED ON WORKSPACE MAXIMIZATION

Hexapod walking robots can be employed for both walking and manipulation purposes. When manipulating, they have 6 degrees of freedom for top platform, high rigidity, high load capacity, high speed, and accuracy. On the other hand, it is very well known that they have limited workspace when they are fixed in place for manipulation. Designing a hexapod robot resulting in a maximized workspace can greatly affect the efficiency of the robot when manipulating. Since radially symmetric hexapod walking robots can be modeled as three 2-RPR planar parallel mechanisms, we have used the methods and calculations that used in this kind of mechanism for designing a radially symmetric hexapod walking robot. In this paper, after a thorough review on existing methods for calculating and improving 2-RPR planar parallel mechanism workspace, an algorithm is presented, which results in a maximized reachable workspace. The merit of the method is that there is no need to calculate the workspace volume when maximizing the workspace volume. Also, following this algorithm is necessary for design of the maximized-workspace robot. In other words, the output of the presented optimization algorithm is a set of robot kinematic parameters, which guarantees the maximized volume of the robot’s reachable workspace.