Hexapod Robot Leg Dynamic Simulation and Experimental Control using Matlab

In this paper the authors present a hexapod robot structure. For the leg has been developed a simple simulation interface to ease the analysis of the motion. The control part is an experimental one and uses Matlab and Arduino Duemilanove development board. The movement of the leg tip along a predefined trajectory was made using a walking algorithm. Moving the leg tip from one point to another is made in two steps: stance phase and swing phase. The communication protocol is also presented. In order to control the robotic leg the direct kinematical model and inverse kinematical model were used. Also the dynamic model using Lagrange method was developed and implemented using SimMechanics toolbox and ode45 function from Matlab. The paper includes some experimental results related to the leg control and some simulations regarding dynamic model.