Regular Article

Research on obstacle climbing gait structure design and gait control of hexapod wall climbing robot based on STM32F103 core controller

¹ School of Transportation and Logistics Engineering Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430063, China
² Hubei Polytechnic Institute, Xiaogan 432000, China

^* e-mail: ghf@whut.edu.cn

Received: 11 October 2022
Accepted: 8 June 2023

Abstract

The hexapod wall climbing robots have the advantages of traversing complex wall surfaces. To traverse complex environments autonomously, it must possess the capability to select gait parameters and paths appropriate for the wall surface. Path planning and gait optimization is a fundamental issue in the aspect of stable, energy efficient robot navigation in complex environments with static and dynamic obstacles. Traditional statistical models have been developed to get the optimal path and gait parameters but the result obtained was very poor. Metaheuristic algorithms are gaining importance in robotic gait planning. In this paper, we proposed robust two stage gait planning approach for predicting collision-free, distance-minimal, smooth navigation path and ensuring stable, energy efficient gait patterns for robots using hybrid metaheuristic algorithms. In the first stage, optimal climbing path for robot is predicted using Tri-objective Grey Wolf Path Optimization (TGWPO) based on obstacle and target detection. In the second stage, the gait parameters adaptive to the constructed climbing path are optimized using Adaptive multi-objective Particle swarm optimization (AMPSO). The hexapod wall climbing robot is designed with STM32F103 as core controller modeled with optimal path planner (using TDWPO) and gait optimizer module (using AMPSO). STM32F103 controller commands and controls the robot to climb on wall with optimized gait parameters according to the optimal path. We analyzed the efficacy of the proposed two stage gait planning approach using TDWPO-AMPSO for hexapod wall climbing robots with existing gait planning approaches in terms of path length, climbing time, gait stability, obstacle avoidance, and energy efficiency. The result analysis showed that the suggested gait planning approach is efficient over conventional strategies for climbing robots.