Software Evolution Of A Hexapod Robot Walking Gait

This paper describes the process of evolving a Hexapod Robot walking gait within a simulated software environment. Initially a 3D mathematical model of the robot was created using Matlab, simulating full motion of each the robot´s six legs. Each leg has three degrees of freedom (DOF), allowing the robot to move in both lateral and rotational directions. The simulation allows the robot´s movements to be determined, based on a repeated sequence of static leg positions, and was used with a genetic algorithm (GA) to evolve walking gaits for the robot. The walking gait is described by a chromosome which is an 18times9 look up table (LUT) that lists the angular position of all eighteen servo motors over a sequence of nine discrete static positions, which will describe the walking gait. Each position in the LUT has twenty discrete states ranging from -45deg to +45deg, allowing a flexible range of achievable motions, while maintaining sensible evaluation limits. Successful evolution of these gaits was performed within 700 generations.