Applied mathematics in Engineering, Management and Technology 2014

The special issue in Management and Technology (Jun. 2014):670-677

www.amiemt-journal.com

Design, Mechanical Simulation and Implementation of a New Six-

Legged Robot
Ahmad Ghanbari*#, Mahdieh Babaiasl#, Ako Veisinejad#
*
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University of Tabriz, 22Bahman Blvd, 5166616471 Tabriz
#
School of Engineering Emerging Technologies, Mechatronic Research Lab, 22Bahman Blvd, 5166616471 Tabriz
Corresponding Author:
Mahdieh Babaiasl, E-mail: m.babaiasl@gmail.com
Tel: +982177122857
Fax: +984113393781

Abstract.

Ants are six-legged insects that can carry loads ten times heavier than their body
weight. Since having six-legs, they are intrinsically stable. They are powerful and
can carry heavy loads. For these reasons, in this paper a new parallel kinematic
structure is proposed for a six-legged ant robot. The mechanical structure is
designed and optimized in Solidworks. The mechanism has six legs and only two
DC motors actuate the six legs so from mechanical point of view the design is an
optimal one. The robot is light weight and semiautonomous due to using wireless
modules. This feature makes this robot to be suitable to be used in social robotics
and rescue robotics applications. The transmitter program is implemented in
supervisor computer using LabVIEW and a microcontroller is used as the main
controller. The electronic board is designed and tested in Proteus Professional and
the PCB board is implemented in Altium Designer. Microcontroller programming is
done in Code Vision.

Keywords: Ant locomotion, Six-legged robots, Hexapods, parallel robots

1. Introduction

Autonomous robots can be divided into manipulators and mobile robots. Based on locomotion on the ground,
mobile robots can be further divided into wheeled robots and legged robots. Legged robots are characterized by
the number of their legs. Among legged robots, six-legged robots have an important place since they are
compliant and stable. This class of legged robots draws special attention from the researchers all over the world,
because of its fascinating nature. SILO6 [1] with the application of removing landmines, underactuated
hexapedal robot [2] inspired by the locomotion of a cockroach, The Space Climber [3], a bio-inspired six-
legged robot [4] inspired by the walking insects, LAURON with a novel leg mechanism [5] with four degrees
of freedom (DOFs), RiSE [6], AQUA [7], DASH [8], DLR-Crawler [9-10], Screenbot [11], Little Crabster [12],
RHex [13], a compliant hexapod robot [14], Biologically Inspired Legged Locomotion Ant Prototype (BILL-
Ant-p) [15] are some of legged robots. A complete survey of legged robots is given in [16]. Most six-legged
robots are inspired by insects whose legs have four degrees of freedom. However most six-legged robots' legs
possess three or less degrees of freedom that reduces their mobility. Using four DOFs for each leg enlarges the
workspace of the leg and makes it redundant. Ant is one of the creatures that can carry loads ten times heavier
than its body weight. This paper demonstrates design, mechanical simulation and implementation of a new six-
legged robot called AntBot I inspired by ants. Initially mechanical design and simulation of the robot using
Solidworks is presented and mechanical parameters of the robot are extracted. The new proposed kinematic
structure has parallel mechanism. The actuators are chosen based on the maximum torques required. The two
actuators drive the six legs, so from mechanical point of view the design is optimal. Afterwards mechanical
implementation and electronic implementation are presented. The electrical circuit and Printed Circuit Board
(PCB) of the robot are designed and tested using Proteus Professional and Altium Designer respectively. To
make the robot autonomous, two wireless modules are used and the transmitter's program is programmed and
tested using LabVIEW software. Atmega16 is used as the main controller and its programming is done using
Codevision [17]. Finally the overall implemented robot that can walk and turn semiautonomously is shown.

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2. Mechanical Design and simulation

2.1 Mechanical design using Solidworks

Figure1 (left) depicts the ultimate design of the robot in Solidworks. Figure 1 (right) through Figure 3 depict
one cycle of robot locomotion. Legs are shown with different colors for better visualization. To mount IR
sensor or camera, a head is also designed for the robot. The head can also be used to mount a manipulator.

2.2 Choosing chassis and legs material

The chassis and legs of the robot can be made from different materials. Wood, plastic, fiberglass and aluminum
are good candidates for chassis and legs material. After studying the properties of these materials, the chassis
and legs of the robot are chosen to be aluminum due to its light weight, low cost and corrosion resistance. To
provide friction under legs of the robot and to make the locomotion of the robot smoother and easier and also to
smoothen under legs and obstacle avoidance, interfacial adhesive is used.

Figure 1 Ultimate mechanical design in Solidworks (left) and First stage of robot locomotion (right)

Figure 2 Second stage of robot locomotion (left) and Third stage of robot locomotion (right)

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Figure 3 Fourth stage of robot locomotion (left) and Fifth stage of robot locomotion (right)

2.3 Choosing actuators

This robot has a minimal number of actuators with only two actuators driving the six legs. Its unique
mechanism allows one actuator to drive the first three legs and one actuator to drive the other three legs. The
actuators are selected based on the maximum torque. The used actuators are two 6 to 12 volts RA geared DC
precious metal-brush motors.

2.4 Choosing power supply

The power supply is chosen based on the used motors. Due to the semiautonomous nature of the robot, the
power supply should be portable. Because of this reason, two MOTOMA 9 volt batteries are chosen as power
supplies.

2.5 Choosing sensors

Position feedback to controllers can be achieved by using two 5k  potentiometers. For our application
potentiometer can be a cost effective choice.

2.6 Center of mass of the robot

One of the important issues to be considered in making a robot is its stability. As shown in Figure 4, the center
of mass of the robot is located on the center of the line connecting the shaft centers of two motors. So from
mechanical viewpoint, the robot is stable. The overall mass of the robot without electrical board is 230grams .
Center of mass of the robot with respect to output coordinate frame is (5.73, 9.25, 4.13)mm . And the principal
moments of inertia (moments of inertia taken at the center of mass and with respect to the coordinate frame
attached to the center of mass) [18] are I xx  0.000419(kgr .m 2 ) , I yy  0.000768(kgr .m 2 ) and
I zz  0.000931(kgr .m 2 ) .

3. Implementation of the robot

After CAD modeling and initial tests in the CAD environment, the final prototype of the robot is implemented
in the Mechatronics research laboratory at the School of Engineering Emerging Technologies, University of
Tabriz. The electronic circuit is designed and tested using Proteus Professional. Figure 5 shows the designed
circuit in Proteus Professional. In the schematic, J3 is 12(v) supply input and using two regulators, the required
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5(v) input to logical circuits and 6(v) input to motors are provided. J7 is power supply on/off switch. J6 is the
receiver's input to the board. J4 and J5 are potentiometer inputs to the board. And finally, J1 and J2 are the
inputs of motors to the board. In order to drive motors, one L298 is used that each IC provides the required
startup current for the two motors. ATMEGA16 is used as the controller. The PCB of the electronic circuit is
designed and implemented using Altium Designer.

Figure 4 Center of mass of the robot

Figure 5 Electronic circuit designed in Proteus Professional

The microcontroller is programmed using Codevision. For wireless communication, two modules are used. The
two modules are HM-T (Transmitter) and HM-R (Receiver). These modules are suitable due to small
dimensions, low power consumption and appropriate range (up to 150 m). In order to connect the receiver
module to the microcontroller, the DATA pin of the HM-R is directly connected to RXD (Receiver in USART
protocol). To connect the transmitter to a supervisor computer a USB to serial converter is used. The transmitter
interface is programmed using LabVIEW. One of the main issues of these modules is that the receiver is highly
susceptible to noise and if every 75ms no data is sent to the receiver, the receiver will receive the noise and pass
it on to the microcontroller. To overcome the mentioned issue, while not sending any data, the transmitter will
send a neutral data to avoid the receiver from getting noise. Besides, in order to be sure that the sent data is
actually the data that is intended to send and is not noise or data from other wireless devices, a password is
assigned in the receiver's program. So if another data is sent from the surrounding modules simultaneously, the
program will identify it and will not process it. On the other hand, encrypting the sent and received data will
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significantly reduce the sensitivity and susceptibility to noise, so that even if no neutral data is sent and the
wrong data is given to microcontroller by the receiver, the program will identify that this data is noise and no
action will be taken. Another faced issue was that the sent data from computer was altered by USB to serial
convertor. So to solve this issue, first the altered data is diagnosed and second the altered data is considered in
the microcontroller programming. Five modes of operation are defined for the robot. These modes are forward
movement, backward movement, right turn, left turn and stop. These 5 modes of operation are controlled using
LabVIEW. Figure 6 shows the interface of the program in LabVIEW.

Figure 6 Modes of operation in LabVIEW

Figure 7 shows the transmitter module and Figure 8 demonstrates the overall system with the supervising
computer and Figure 9 depicts the implemented six-legged ant robot.
The wireless algorithm is as follows:
Wireless Send Receive pseudo code:
Computer (Sender or Server) Algorithm:
While (start)
Send 1;
If (Command)
Send Command
End if
End While

Ant (Receiver or Client) Algorithm:

While (1)
Receive Input
If (Input Is Command)
Stop Previous Command
Do New Command
End if
End While

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Figure 7 Transmitter module

Figure 8 Overall system with supervising computer

Figure 9 Six-legged AntBot I

4. Discussion

Living organisms have muscles that are more stronger than electric motors. The body organs are also stronger
and lighter than synthetic materials. Ants are also very small creatures and their bodies are very delicate.
Considering all these features put constraints on designing robots similar to living organisms. The closest
artificial alloy that is both strong and light is aluminum. Ants are fascinating creatures since (1) they have six
legs that this feature makes them stable creatures and so a six-legged robot will be a stable one; (2) they are
strong and powerful creatures due to their body structure and they can carry heavy loads; (3) they are sociable
and work together to carry out specific tasks and this goal can be achieved by making several ant robots; (4)
they are creatures that can communicate with each other chemically, however this feature cannot be fully
mimicked. But the most important thing is to make robots that can communicate and to achieve this goal,
wireless communication is utilized.
A lot of research has been conducted on ant robots and more generally on six-legged robots, but the main
advantages of this robot compared to others are: (1) being light-weight, (2) being low-cost, (3) ease of control,
(4) having relatively high speed compared to fellow robots and (5) the ability to carry high loads with respect to
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its weight. All of these features together cannot be found in just one robot. Table1 shows a simple comparison
between some six-legged robots with our AntBotI. From this table it can be seen that by considering the
dimensions of the robot, it has high speed and load carrying capacity.

Table 1 Comparison of AntBot I with other six-legged robots.

Lauron III
AntBot I

Machine
Walking
Robot II

Tarry II
ANT-p
BILL-
Robot

TUM
Length(m) 0.155 .33 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.8
Width(m) 0.10 .33 0.3 0.25 0.2 0.4
Height(m) 0.10 .15 0.8 0.5 0.4 1.0
Max. Speed(m/s) 0.1 0.004 0.4 0.14 0.2 0.3
Weight(kg) 0.230 2.3 18 -- 2.9 23
Load(kg) .075 8.6 10 -- 2.9 5
Legs 6 6 6 6 6 6
Power
0.9 20 90 -- 30 500
Consumption(W)

5. Conclusion

In this paper, design, simulation and implementation of a new six-legged ant robot was proposed. The
kinematic structure of the robot was parallel and only two motors were used to actuate the six legs. The
mechanical structure was designed using Solidworks. The robot can walk and turn and because of using
wireless modules it is semiautonomous. The transmitter program was implemented using LabVIEW on the
supervisor computer and five modes of operation were defined for the robot. The robot is light weight and can
mimic the ant.

6. Future work

There are several possible extensions that can be made to this robot. First a vision system can be implemented
and a vision-based control strategy can be used. The vision system can be put on the head of the robot. Second,
obstacle-avoidance sensors such as infrared can be used to avoid obstacles and position and velocity sensors
such as encoders can be used instead of potentiometers. Additionally by considering the fact that the kinematic
structure of the robot is parallel [19], various control strategies can be implemented to help the robot walk even
on rough terrain. However, it should be noted that the aim of AntBot I was to make a six-legged robot and the
control strategy will be implemented in the future. Since the robot is equipped with a wireless system, in the
future the robot will communicate with fellow ants and by their contribution it will be able to carry out a task.
This can be done by either using a central server and ants as clients or all ants can communicate with each other
without the intervention of a central server. The simplicity of this robot makes the robot both cost-effective and
suitable for social applications.

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