M6 Six Motors Robot

The M6 robot is a mobile modular platform for testing locomotion in unstructured enviroments.This robot is a six wheeled machine with an highly adaptive chassis designed to test this type of configuration in unstructured terrain. The system consists of six wheels, each representing an autonomous module. Each wheel, in fact, contains a stepper motor, a velocity reduction gear and the electronic power board used to drive the stepper motor. In this way only the control signal and power supply are necessary to control the wheel module. These particular modules facilitate the testing of various system configurations, connecting the wheels in a different way each time.

Each pair of wheels are jointed to the others by a pneumatic cylinder to realize a prismatic and rotational joint with variable stiffness. In this way, there are three degrees of freedom between each pair of wheels. This structure results in a robot with a very low barycentre and a great adaptability to new surroundings, giving excellent stability in unstructured environments like volcanic terrain.

Control was implemented using an ST72E331 micro-controller, based on an industry-standard 8-bit architecture extended by STMicroelectronics to better accommodate high level language programming. This generates all the signals needed to control the six modules. The microcontroller communicates via RS232 with a remote PC used to give the motion commands to the prototype.

1. M.Lacagnina, S.Guccione, G.Muscato, R.Sinatra, "Modelling and Simulation of Multibody Mobile Robot for Volcanic Environment Explorations", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS2002, Lausanne Switzerland, Sep.30 - Oct.4 2002.