SHeRo: Scalable hexapod robot for maintenance, repair, and operations

Improper maintenance, repair, and operations of societal centric structures can lead to catastrophic failures that drastically affect global economy, the environment, and everyday life. Due to the remote, cramped and highly irregular environmental nature of these structures, routine manual procedures and operations can be rather tedious, dangerous, and hazardous for humans. Automating maintenance, repair, and operations removes human workers from having to crawl within highly cluttered and constrained spaces, breathing in stale air mixed with fumes from welding or particulate from repair work, and provides higher reliability and consistency in the repair work. This paper introduces SHeRo, a scalable hexapod robot designed for maintenance, repair, and operations within remote, inaccessible, irregular, and hazardous environments. The scalability of the design enhances traditional hexapod robot designs by incorporating two prismatic joints into each leg. A detailed discussion on the design and realization of SHeRo is provided. An analysis on the stability and workspace of SHeRo is presented and a dynamic criterion is developed to integrate the concepts of robot stability and constant orientation workspace into a stable workspace. The analytical solution of the lateral stable workspace of SHeRo is derived along with a metric for comparing stable workspace between different robot configurations. A simulated demonstration and two physical experimental demonstrations are presented showing the advantage of introducing scalability into the hexapod robot design along with the workspace enhancement and flexibility of the scalable hexapod robot. (c) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.