Statics Optimization of a Hexapedal Robot Modelled as a Stewart Platform

SILVER2 is an underwater legged robot designed with the aim of collecting litter on the seabed and sample the sediment to assess the presence of micro-plastics. Besides the original application, SILVER2 can also be a valuable tool for all underwater operations which require to interact with objects directly on the seabed. The advancement presented in this paper is to model SILVER2 as a Gough-Stewart platform, and therefore to enhance its ability to interact with the environment. Since the robot is equipped with six segmented legs with three actuated joints, it is able to make arbitrary movements in the six degrees of freedom. The robot’s performance has been analysed from both kinematics and statics points of view. The goal of this work is providing a strategy to harness the redundancy of SILVER2 by finding the optimal posture to maximize forces/torques that it can resist along/around constrained directions. Simulation results have been reported to show the advantages of the proposed method.