Obstacle avoidance and motion planning scheme for a hexapod robot Octopus-III

Legged robots have advanced potential to move in complex environment accomplishing operating, rescuing and detecting tasks. In real applications, bypassing large obstacles is a more common choice for legged robots comparing with walking over and climbing the obstacles. However, few papers involve the obstacle avoidance approach for legged robots. An obstacle avoidance and motion planning scheme for a hexapod robot is presented in this paper. The scheme takes advantage of the superior mobility of the legged robot and fulfills requirements of walking stability and kinematic feasibility. Firstly, a novel obstacle avoidance trajectory planning method is proposed, which is inspired by the superior mobility of the legged robot. Then, a motion generation approach for the legged robot is developed to control the robot to walk along the planned trajectory. The approach coordinates the body motion and the feet motions to fulfill requirements of walking stability and kinematic feasibility simultaneously. Finally, the scheme is integrated on a hexapod robot and tested by real experiments.