Development of Foot Contact Sensors for a Crawling Platform

Walking machines are a good compromise between flying machines with a small payload and wheeled machines with limited terrain crossing capabilities for displacements on strongly uneven terrain, such as in search and rescue missions. This paper presents the hardware development of a hexapod crawling robot, in particular the development and integration of foot contact sensors. The development is based on Trossen Robotics’ PhantomX hexapod robotics kit. In its original version, the robot is only meant to be remote controller without any feedback from exteroceptive sensors. We present here a new foot contact sensor providing the required feedback for the contact between the robot’s foot and the ground and their electronic integration in the rest of the system.