Realization and Control of a Prototype of Legged Rover for Planetary Exploration

This paper concerns the developernent of a prototype of a six-legged robot for space exploration. The robot is a testbed for a new control technique based on a peculiar kind of artificial neural network. Accounts are given on the shape and structure of the hexapod, and a brief description of its electronic circuit and computer interface is shown. The paper ends with the results of the tests on two different control systems (a standard one and the neural network based) and the comparison between the properties of the two methods.