Kinematics open loop control of hexapod robot with an embedded Digital Signal Controller (DSC)

This paper describes the design and development of hexapod robot with three degrees of freedom (3 DOF) at each leg. The system developed is composed of the mechanical assembly, the circuits used to control the servomotors (Digital Signal Controller - DSC) and the firmware developed to control the robot through the joystick. The angles for all the joints have to be calculated in a pre-defined period in a real time mode due to hardware restrictions imposed by the DSC specified. It is described the numeric solution of nonlinear Newton-Raphson system equations with a MATLAB code developed to implement the forward and inverse kinematics. The C code optimized from this software was downloaded to the hardware. The techniques applied to minimize the processing time in a given period are explained and, at the end of this work, some future improvements to the project are discussed.