Morphological design of the bio-inspired reconfigurable HexaQuaBip robot

This paper presents the leg design of the HexaQuaBip robot, namely a bio-inspired polymorphic robot intended to be able to reconfigure its morphology in most of hexapod, quadruped and biped animals. We first review segmentation and kinematics of their legs and define the HQB's reconfigurable kinematics. The resulting leg model is four-segmented and entails seven degrees of freedom. Then, we analyze the diversity in limb proportions of animal legs and determine where to put sliding joints on HQB's legs. We found that one sliding joint on the third segment of each leg is enough to approximate limb proportions of most of hexapod, quadruped and biped animals. Finally, we conclude by considering hardware implementations of the complex theoretically-designed HQB's morphology.