NKhex: A New Miniature Hexapod Crawling Robot With Visual Perception and Target Tracking
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Abstract
Scaling a large crawling robot to the centimeter-level size is a major technical challenge, which mainly includes the research on mechanical structure design, independent battery life, maneuverability, and perception. For most miniature crawling robots, it is difficult to synchronously balance the aspects of simple structure, good maneuverability, and visual perception. Aiming at such problems, this article designs a composite-cam-driven miniature hexapod crawling robot, named NKhex, with the abilities of visual perception and target tracking. The size of the microrobot is centimeter-level, and only two micromotors are used as drivers. The tripod gait motion of the robot can be realized with the six outriggers through the composite cam transmission mechanism. The robot is equipped with a miniature camera and has the functions of visual perception and object recognition via training neural networks, based on which it can achieve trajectory tracking and moving target tracking through closed-loop control. Besides, the robot is able to crawl and turn quickly in narrow space and outdoor environment, thus presenting potential applications in emergency rescue and data collection in dangerous areas. Sufficient experiments are carried out to verify the motion performance and perception ability of the robot.