• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.62 no.4
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• pp.536-543
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• 2013

In this paper, we propose a new type of hexapod robot that can walk fast. Most of the conventional hexapod robots are either rectangular type of hexagonal type. Those robots have drawbacks in the speed and stability of walking. The proposed robot has six legs, one fore leg, one hind leg, two left legs and two right legs. The proposed robot forms relatively wide supporting polygons along the walking direction, so it can walk very fast stably. We implemented the proposed hexapod robot and showed the feasibility of the robot by 3+3 walking experiment and 2+4 walking experiment.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers D
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• v.54 no.3
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• pp.131-140
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• 2005

Fault-tolerant gait generation of a hexapod robot with crab walking is proposed. The considered fault is a locked joint failure, which prevents a joint of a leg from moving and makes it locked in a known position. Due to the reduced workspace of a failed leg, fault-tolerant crab walking has a limitation in the range of heading direction. In this paper, an accessible range of the crab angle is derived for a given configuration of the failed leg and, based on the principles of fault-tolerant gait planning, periodic crab gaits are proposed in which a hexapod robot realizes crab walking after a locked joint failure, having a reasonable stride length and stability margin. The proposed crab walking is then applied to path planning on uneven terrain with positive obstacles. i.e., protruded obstacles which legged robots cannot cross over but have to take a roundabout route to avoid. The robot trajectory should be generated such that the crab angle does not exceed the restricted range caused by a locked joint failure.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.168-174
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• 2015

The ultimate purpose of a walking robot is to move to a designated spot and to perform a necessary manipulation. To perform various manipulations for a walking robot, it should have some kind of an extra manipulator. However, if the manipulation task for the robot is simple enough, the robot can perform the task by using its legs. Among various kinds of walking robots, a hexapod walking robot has relatively many legs, so it has the advantage of stability and walking speed. So, a hexapod walking robot can perform simple manipulation task by using its one or two legs while maintaining stability by using the rest of legs. In this paper, we deal with a simple manipulation task of holding a ball. We formulate the task as a redundancy resolution problem and propose a method for obtaining an optimal solution.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.124-129
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• 2013

Hexapod walking robots are superior to biped or quadruped ones in terms of walking stability. Therefore hexapod robots have the advantage in performing intelligent tasks based on walking stability. In this paper, we propose a hexapod robot that has one fore leg, one hind leg, two left legs, and two right legs and can perform various intelligent tasks. We build the robot by using 26 motors and implement a controller which consists of a host PC, a DSP main controller, an AVR auxiliary controller, and smart phone/pad. We show by several experiments that the implemented robot can perform various intelligent tasks such as uneven surface walking, tracking and kicking a ball, remote control and 3D monitoring by using data obtained from stereo camera, infrared sensors, ultra sound sensors, and contact sensors.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.27 no.7
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• pp.36-48
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• 2010

This paper is concerned with stereo vision-based approach to detect obstacles and to generate the path of destination from the start. The hexapod robot in the experiment is cable of walking by legs and driving by wheels simultaneously. The hexapod robot operates under the driving mode normally, and it changes driving mode to walking mode to overcome obstacles using its legs. Disparity map, which is the correlation between two images taken by stereo camera, is employed for calculation of the distance between the robot and obstacles. When the obstacles information is extracted from the disparity map, the potential field algorithm is applied to create the obstacle-avoidance path. Simulator, based on OpenGL, is developed to generate the graphical path, and the experimental results are shown for the verification of the proposed algorithm.

• 한국HCI학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2008.02a
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• pp.534-539
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• 2008

This paper is about intelligent hexapod robot for the support walking of the aged person. The robot using various sensors and small camera has various abilities of forward backward walking, turing left or right, control the speed of walking, avoiding the obstacles and detecting risky situation of fire or gas. To let the aged feel soft and safe walking, we used special servo motor and developed hexapod walking mechanism and effective algorithm.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.339-347
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• 2007

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.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.19 no.12
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• pp.1152-1159
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• 2013

This paper proposes an effective walking system for a hexapod robot on uneven terrain. To overcome the deficiencies of two-pair walking systems, which are effective on even terrain, the use of only three legs changes the steps required for movement. The proposed system receives feedback data from switches attached to the bottom of the legs and gyro sensor to carry out stable walking using the Bezier curve algorithm. From the coordinates of the Bezier curve, which guarantees the circular motion of legs, the motor's angle value can be obtained using inverse kinematics. The angle values are sent to each motor though RS-485 communication. If a switch is pushed by the surface during navigation in the Bezier curve pattern, the robot is designed to change its circular course. Through the changed course, each leg can be located on an optimal surface and the wobble phenomenon is reduced by using a normal vector algorithm. The simulation and experiment results show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers D
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• v.53 no.8
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• pp.585-593
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• 2004

Fault-tolerant gait planning in legged locomotion is to design gaits with which legged robots can maintain static stability and motion continuity against a failure in a leg. For planning a robust and deadlock-free fault-tolerant gait, kinematic constraints caused by a failed leg should be closely examined with respect to remaining mobility of the leg. In this paper, based on the authors's previous results, deadlock avoidance scheme for fault-tolerant gait planning is proposed for a hexapod robot walking over even terrain. The considered fault is a locked joint failure, which prevents a joint of a leg from moving and makes it locked in a known position. It is shown that for guaranteeing the existence of the previously proposed fault-tolerant tripod gait of a hexapod robot, the configuration of the failed leg must be within a range of kinematic constraints. Then, for coping with failure situations where the existence condition is not satisfied, the previous fault-tolerant tripod gait is improved by including the adjustment of the foot trajectory. The foot trajectory adjustment procedure is analytically derived to show that it can help the fault-tolerant gait avoid deadlock resulting from the kinematic constraint and does not make any harmful effect on gait mobility. The post-failure walking problem of a hexapod robot with the normal tripod gait is addressed as a case study to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.9 no.11
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• pp.943-951
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• 2003

A strategy for fault-tolerant gaits of autonomous legged robots is proposed. A legged robot is considered to be fault tolerant with respect to a given failure if it is guaranteed to be capable of walking maintaining its static stability after the occurrence of the failure. The failure concerned in this paper is a locked joint failure for which a joint in a leg cannot move and is locked in place. If a failed joint is locked, the workspace of the resulting leg is constrained, but legged robots have fault tolerance capability to continue static walking. An algorithm for generating fault-tolerant gaits is described and, especially, periodic gaits are presented for forward walking of a hexapod robot with a locked joint failure. The leg sequence and the formula of the stride length are analytically driven based on gait study and robot kinematics. The transition procedure from a normal gait to the proposed fault-tolerant gait is shown to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed scheme.