The HexaQuaBip (HQB) is the project name of a six-legged robot that can walk independently on two, four, and six legs. This walking machine can automatically adapt its intrinsic nature, according to different criteria and respecting user specifications.

Observation

When it comes to legged locomotion in robotic, a lot of walking machines have been developed in the last 50 years. This is true for any number of legs, from mono-hopping machine to octopod or more, and even Only a few original robot (Rhex for example, which uses legs as wheels) have emerged in the last decade. Honda is developing running biped robots (Asimo can run at 6 km.h-1) that will hardly be challenged. And all of these developments took many years of research, design, conception and engineering.

Schematic characteristics of 2, 4 and 6 legged robot

The same observation applies. Bipeds, quadrupeds, and hexapods are all existing on our planet, at every scale, cohabiting or living exclusively in some places. Six-legged insects have colonized every place on earth, while some quadruped mammals are only present in some part of it.

Each of the robotic machines has off course advantages and disadvantages according to different factors like stability, type of terrain, desired speed or others. It is the same with animals in nature, some being specialized for different characteristics, snake-like robot. Finding a new concept is then becoming a very hard task, and it is not the goal here. or different places. The table 1 shows a really schematic view of different skills according to the number of legs. We can see that from biped to hexapod, there is a lot of varieties and that it will not always be easy to choose the most adapted configuration.

Objectives

Starting from these observations, the general objective is, without going into details, to have a robot that combines all the advantages of the previous walking machines and avoids their defects. This machine could adapt to many different situations, even choosing the best strategy by itself (respecting user specifications).

Kinematics:

HQB's kinematics has been defined inspired by the different anatomy of Hexapods, Quadrupeds and Bipeds animals. Here are some examples of possible configurations:

Illustration 1: Hexapodd mode	Illustration 2: Reptilian mode	Illustration 3: Mammal mode

Illustration 4: Bird mode	Illustration 5: Human

Publications:

A. Veinguertener, B. Hennion, O. Bruneau, J-G. Fontaine, "From HexaQuaBip to Dynamic walking", Poster at Dynamic Walking Conference, Delft (The Netherlands), May 2008.

A. Veinguertener, T. Hoinville, O. Bruneau, J-G. Fontaine, "Morphological design of the bioinspired reconfigurable HexaQuaBip robot", Climbing and Walking Robots and the Support Technologies for Mobile Machines, Istanbul (Turkey), September 2009.