Bruce -- Design and Development of a Dynamic Hexapod Robot
This work addresses the challenge of rapid deployment and robust movement for robots in unstructured environments like the DARPA SubT Challenge, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods like RHex-inspired control.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling autonomous, dynamic locomotion for hexapod robots over difficult terrain by introducing Bruce, a robot built with 3D-printed parts and linear series elastic actuators, achieving speeds of 0.3m/s on rough terrain and 0.5m/s on flat ground with a simple controller.
This paper introduces Bruce, the CSIRO Dynamic Hexapod Robot capable of autonomous, dynamic locomotion over difficult terrain. This robot is built around Apptronik linear series elastic actuators, and went from design to deployment in under a year by using approximately 80\% 3D printed structural (joints and link) parts. The robot has so far demonstrated rough terrain traversal over grass, rocks and rubble at 0.3m/s, and flat-ground speeds up to 0.5m/s. This was achieved with a simple controller, inspired by RHex, with a central pattern generator, task-frame impedance control for individual legs and no foot contact detection. The robot is designed to move at up to 1.0m/s on flat ground with appropriate control, and was deployed into the the DARPA SubT Challenge Tunnel circuit event in August 2019.