Locomotion Control for a Land-Air Hexapod Robot

In this paper, a land-air hexapod robot is developed. This robot has two locomotion modes: walking mode and flying mode. In the walking mode, the robot climbs like a hexapod robot. In the flying mode, the robot flies like a multi-rotor UAV. Control method is developed for both ground and air locomotion. The single legs inverse kinematics equation, tripod gait generator and foot point trajectory module are derived and developed to achieve this robots walking ability. An attitude controller is developed to achieve this robots flying ability. Through the simulation and actual experiments, this robot is able to keep stable during both ground and air locomotion, which verifies the effectiveness of proposed control method and the feasibility of designed land- air hexapod robot.