HECTOR, a New Hexapod Robot Platform with Increased Mobility - Control Approach, Design and Communication

At the University of Bielefeld a new bio-inspired, hexapod robot system called HECTOR has been developed and is currently set up. To benefit from bioinspired control approaches it is fundamental to identify the most important body aspects in biological examples and to transfer body features and control approaches as pairs to the technical system. According to this, the main functional characteristics of HECTOR as presented in this paper are the elasticity in the self-contained leg joint-drives with integrated sensory processing capabilities, actuated body joints and in addition a lean bus system for onboard communication.

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