Semi-autonomous Walking Control of a Hexapod Robot Based on Contact Point Planning and Follow-the-Contact-Point Gait Control

This paper proposes semi-autonomous walking control for a hexapod robot controlled by Follow-the-Contact Point (FCP) gait control. In the FCP gait control, each leg contacts the same contact point with which the front legs are in contact, so the motion planning of all legs is focused on the contact point planning of the foremost legs. The robot perceives the ground surface at each step with depth sensors and creates a grid map from the resulting point cloud. The operator inputs the robot's posture and height from the controller to a PC. The PC plans several steps for the foremost legs, and the robot moves the first of the planned steps. Contact point planning is based on a modified A* algorithm. Experiments in which the robot walked on uneven terrains and S-curve confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.