The bionic Pohod15Leg leg: an exoskeletal ant-inspired leg for load transportation

Every year, numerous bio-inspired hexapod prototypes are built in various fields of research, such as navigation, social behavior and locomotion. Staying within these three fields, several hexapod robots developed over the last two decades are presented in this review (Manoonpong et al. 2021). The most common category corresponds to hexapods with a mass 0.5∼10kg. All these robots are driven by low-power electric servomotors (each consuming an electric power of around 30W). Servomotor-based hexapods are frequently used because of their low manufacturing cost 0.5∼3k€. Moreover, electric servomotors are easy to drive, as there are usually many prefabricated development boards integrating the control system. To better understand how animals work, for example, how ants run so fast or carry such a heavy load? This requires to estimate the gap between the limits of the animal model and the bio-inspired hexapod. It is therefore relevant to proceed with the hexapod design step by step, considering the current technological limits constraining the robot design process. In this study, we will compare the level of performance of the first exoskeletal ant-inspired leg for load transportation, called Pohod15Leg, designed and fabricated to be compared to the current state-of-the-art in servomotor-based legs, i.e., a bionic leg actuated by 3 Dynamixel AX-18A servomotors, called AXLeg. These two bionic legs will be evaluated in similar experimental conditions with the same test bench, called MiMiC-ANT test bench (Brodoline et al. 2022).