Hexapod

When I first came across a hexapod robot online, I immediately knew I wanted one. That is why I decided to make one myself from a DIY kit, while studying at university.

The goal of this project was to learn how to make and program a hexapod robot. To do this, I assembled a kit from China that is based of the Lynxmotion Phoenix Hexapod – The robot that inspired this project.

After the kit was assembled, I started working on the inverse kinematics engine that will control the legs to move to certain positions in a 3D environment. I used KurtE’s Arduino Phoenix Parts repository on GitHub to get started with the inverse kinematics.

Hexapod

A hexapod robot has sig legs that are driven by three servos each, this gives the leg three degrees of freedom which allows it to move in any direction. You can find more Hexapod based robots on the Zenta YouTube Channel – which is definitely worth checking out!

Overview

I hooked a PlayStation 2 receiver up to an Arduino Nano on the Hexapod, this Arduino will use a inverse kinematics engine to determine the angle of each servo to reach the desired position. The Arduino sends these angles to the SSC-32U Servo Controller over a serial connection.

The servo controller will then send each angle to one of the 18 servos, this board is also used to power all of these servos. Servo power is supplied by a 6V 3000mAh NiMH battery, which is enough to run the robot for around 12 minutes. A smaller 9V battery is used to power logic.

Costs

The kit I ordered uses cheaper servos compared to the original Lynxmotion Phoenix. I also ordered some rubber feet to give the robot a bit more grip – bare metal feet on wooden floors was a bad idea…

Here’s a summary of all the costs for this project, the Price column does not include any discounts or shipping costs:

Demonstration

Check out the full playlist on YouTube for more videos!