Hey roboticists,
Hexapod robots are among some of the most popular designs for walking bots, but as I’m sure many of you know, the higher the count of limbs the higher the cost of the robot in the end. RHex is one of the earliest hexapod designs, developed by University of Michigan and manufactured by Boston Dynamics and showed the advantages of these types of robots.
However, costs remained high for a robot with this level of performance until Carnegie Mellon University’s Robomechanics Lab developed the MiniRHex, based on the DYNAMIXEL XL-320:
MiniHRex offers much of the same all-terrain performance as the HRex platform, at an extreme fraction of the cost. MiniHRex can be assembled for less than $200 where some versions of the HRex full-sized robot cost up to $20,000. In addition, due to the novel leg design and load distribution, the MiniHRex has been tested with payloads up to 3 pounds which is fantastic for a robot with such a small size!
To learn more about the MiniHRex, check out the IEEE article here:
