초록
A hexapod walking robot had been developed for gathering information in the field. The developed robot was $260{\times}260{\times}130$ ($W{\times}L{\times}H$, mm) in size and 14.7 N in weight. The legs had nineteen degrees of freedom. A leg has three rotational joints actuated by small servomotors. Two servomotors placed at ankle and knee played the roles of vertical joint for up and down motions of the leg and the other one placed at coxa played the role of horizontal joint for forward and backward motions. In addition, a servomotor placed at thorax between the front legs and the middle legs played the role of vertical joint for pumping the two front legs to climb stair or inclination. Walking motion of the robot was executed by tripod gait. The robot was controlled by manual remote-controller communicated by an infrared ray. Two controllers were equipped to control the walking of the robot. The sub-controller using PIC microcomputer (Microchips, PIC16F84A) received the 16 bit command signal from the manual remote controller, decoded it to 8bit and transmitted it to the main microcomputer (RENESAS, SH2/7045), which controlled the 19 servomotors using the PWM command signals. Walking speeds were controlled by adjusting the period of command cycle and the stride. Forward walking speed were within 100 cm/min to 300 cm/min. However, experimental walking speed had the error of 4-40 cm/min to compare with the theoretical one, because of slippage of the leg and the circular arc motion of servomotor of coxa.
