KINEMATIC PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS FOR HEXAPOD MOBILE ROBOT USING PARALLEL MECHANISM

Walking robots have been studied a lot over last several decades due to their good adaptability in different complex environments. The walking robot in this paper is designed for the research on emergency rescue missions in nuclear plants. Unlike other mobile robots, it apply parallel mechanism for its legs. This paper mainly focus on the kinematic performance of the parallel leg mechanism. SeCtion 2 gives a brief introduction of our robot and the kinematic model. Then section 3 analyze the workspace of the leg tip. After that the payload and velocity capability are discussed respectively and it turns out that the mechanism has very good payload performance but the velocity is relatively low. Next the isotropic characteristic is studied in the whole workspace. Then the experiments indicate that the robot can successfully finish walking and manipulating tasks.