As a result of exponentially developing science and technology, tremendous amount of research is being undertaken on mobile robots which are commonly used in both domestic and industrial applications. Hexapod robot is a type of legged mobile robot that is autonomous and omni-directional.

This report presents the hierarchical control architecture that is developed to control a six-legged robot which was modelled within the MapleSim environment. In addition, 2 different map-based path planning algorithms, A* (star) and Probabilistic Roadmap Method (PRM) are implemented to find the shortest path to a given goal and to step over obstacles, respectively. Static and dynamic analyses of the hexapod model are given and an adaptive gait selector which was implemented to improve the stability depending on the terrain slope, is presented. A geometric approach to tilt control has been developed and implemented. Moreover, a multivariable control was implemented in the low level controller of the hierarchy for position control and trajectory tracking. MATLAB and MapleSim are widely used throughout the project and the important codes are provided in the Appendix.

The obtained results show that the hexapod robot successfully navigates between point A and point B in both of the implemented approaches: slalom and pedestrian-lane-change.

Key words: Hexapod, MapleSim, Hierarchical Control, Path Planning