The AntBot hexapod robot

The question of the robot's number of legs may seem trivial, but it is precisely the number of legs that will determine the robot's dynamic performance, which will have a definite impact on its perception of the environment and on autonomous navigation. First of all, the design of a hexapod robot is fundamentally justified by the need to make the machine coincide as closely as possible with the animal, i.e. the desert ant from which we drew our inspiration, which, because it is an insect, has six legs distributed along its thorax. Our decision to use a hexapod robot, rather than one with four or eight legs, or even a biped, is also justified from an efficiency point of view. Quadrupedal robots consume less energy, but are inherently unstable. This instability is due to the fact that, at any given moment, one of the four legs is in transfer, putting the whole platform in cantilever position....