Perception-Based Gait Planning for a Hexapod Robot Walking on Typical Structured Terrain

Legged robots have excellent terrain adaptability and can be used to accomplish rescuing and detecting tasks instead of human beings in harsh environment. This paper presents a framework developed to increase the autonomy and versatility of a hexapod robot. It combines terrain perception with four locomotion strategies, a flat-floor gait, a step-on gait, a step-down gait and a ditch-over gait. This way the robot can perceive the environment and distinguish four typical structured terrain, flat-floor step-on, step-down and ditch. Based on different terrain, the appropriate locomotion strategy is selected to be carried out. The terrain perception and the gait selection are performed autonomously. We present experiment trials of the Hexapod-III robot walking in structured environment including the flat-floor, step-on, step-down and ditch. The experiment results show that the robot has the ability to distinguish four typical structured terrain and pass through them autonomously.