A Hexapod Walking Micro-Robot with Compliant Legs

The conventional mechanisms with stiff joints make the robots more complex, heavy, large and expensive. As walking robots are requested to perform tasks in rough terrain, the development of actuators capable to flexibly adapt to the unstructured environment becomes more and more necessary. Biological mechanisms like legs with high effectiveness and developing high forces are very common in nature. This is why introducing such structures in robotics is one of the most popular research in biomimetics. A wide variety of artificial muscles as actuators in robotics have been investigated till now. Shape Memory Alloys are a category of such artificial muscles which can be used as actuators in the structure of a biomimetic walking robot. In this paper, mechanisms that can convert the small strain of a SMA wire into large motion, used as legs for a hexapod walking micro-robot, are discussed.