Big-Stiquito: An enlarged and faster version of the autonomous Stiquito hexapod robot

Abstract

Mill's Stiquito hexapod mobile robot is based on the use of antagonist active Nitinol (NiTi) wire/passive music wire couples to produce moving insect-like legs. We show that it is possible to over-dimension the wire diameters and to rearrange the positioning of active and passive actuator elements in order to develop a bigger and heavier autonomous version of the Stiquito with a power autonomy of about 30min and a mean speed of about 20cm/min, twice the original Stiquito speed. While the original Stiquito is essentially an educational tool, this bigger version could lead to new applications for shape memory alloys (SMA) mini-robots in service robotics such as exploration or supervision.