Hexie (fig. 1) is a hexapod robot I made as a passion project during a summer break. It taught me a lot about the end-to-end process of creating a small robot, and also gave me direct hands-on experience working with electronics to solve problems with power distribution and radio communications.

My goal for the Hexie project was to, by the end of the summer, have the robot walk around with remote control with gait generation. I succeeded in this goal and was very happy with the final product. The main logic, including gait generation and taking a control input, are on an Arduino Mega. Because the servo library uses the Arduino’s clock, which is also necessary for radio communication, I added an ARduino Nano that communicated with the Arduino Mega via serial communication. The nano handles the radio communication from an HC-12 radio module, then sends this as a control input to the Arduino Mega. Another highlight of the project was creating the gaits for the legs. To remain stable, three legs must be on the ground at all times. Each leg has three servos that can be controlled independently. I tested multiple gait patterns to determine a stable and efficient method for getting the robot to walk smoothly.