Motion analysis of a robot using a dedicated Matlab interface

In the present paper the authors present a software platform made for motion analysis over common types of obstacles using Matlab. Besides this the interface allows the study of stability of the robot in gravitational field. It was also proposed a new design for the robot leg and calculated its kinematical and dynamical model and workspace analysis. Next are presented the most common types of obstacles and two particular types as well. For each of them were proposed a series of locomotion sequences, in order to overcome them, using the following constraints: maintain the robot's body parallel with respect to the ground and maintaining the maximum height of the robot, relative to the obstacle. The control part for the robot consists of: Matlab, a microcontroller based development board and a dedicated servomotor controller board. The trajectory generator for the leg tip was implemented using piecewise cubic spline interpolation method. The experimental results included in this paper were obtained using the physical model of the hexapod robot.