Kris Temmerman's Beautiful Hexapod Bot

Kris Temmerman decided to build a hexapod, and since he didn’t exactly know how one would work, he started by making a simulation. The initial result is an on-screen robot that looks great, and allowed him to experiment with inverse kinematics in this type of six-legged robot setup. He notes that this is a great way to tinker around with robotics if you don’t (yet) have a shop or tools to actually make your creation — a step that could always come later if you so choose.

From there, he modeled the body and linkages in Fusion 360, and printed out the parts he needed. Included in this design are excellent-looking Dynamixel motors, six of which are applied to the end of the linkage to tilt it up and down. The six other Dynamixel units on the “shoulder” axis, however, contain two separate motors, allowing two degrees of freedom in one package.

Onboard control for the robot is via an OpenCM9.04 32-bit Arm Cortex-M3 dev board, which is compatible with the Arduio IDE and other tools. The inverse kinematics design was written in C++, so it could be uploaded to the microcontroller with no changes. He also created an Arduino Due-based remote control for the unit, which looks great, but is mostly brushed over in the video.

Code for the project is available on GitHub, and even more resources are found in the video description. It’s a beautiful bot, and something worth studying if you want to make your own iteration of this hexpod!