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🕷️ Mithi's Hexapod Robot Simulator

• A bare minimum browser-based hexapod robot simulator built from first principles 🕷️
• If you like this project, consider buying me a few ☕ cups of coffee. 💕

STATUS	FEATURE	DESCRIPTION
🎉	Forward Kinematics	Given the angles of each joint, what does the robot look like?
🎉	Inverse Kinematics	What are the angles of each joint to make the robot look the way I want? Is it even possible? Why or why not?
🎉	Uniform Movements	If all of the legs behaved the same way, how will the hexapod robot as a whole behave?
🎉	Customizability	Set the dimensions and shape of the robot's body and legs. (6 parameters)
🎉	Usability	Control the camera view, pan, tilt, zoom, whatever.
🎉	Simplicity	Minimal dependencies. Depends solely on Numpy for calculations. Uses only Plotly Dash for plotting, Dash can be safely replaced if a better 3d plotting library is available.
❗	Stability Check (WIP)	If we pose the robot in a particular way, will it fall over?
❗	Fast	Okay, it's not as fast as I wanted, but when run locally, it's okay
❗	Bug-free	Fine, right now there's still room for improvement
❗	Well-tested	Yeah, I need to compile test cases first

🕷️ Preview

🕷️ Requirements

• Python 3.8.1
• Plotly Dash 1.10.0
• Plotly Dash Daq 0.4.0
• Numpy 1.18.1
• See also ./requirements.txt

🕷Run

$ python index.py
Running on http://127.0.0.1:8050/

• Modify default settings with ./settings.py
• Dark Mode is the default - modify page styles with ./style_settings.py

⚠️ Known Issues

• ❗Priority
• ❗Good First Issue
• ❗Help Wanted
• ❗Bugs
• ❗All

🕷️Conventions and Algorithms

• Definitions
  • Linkage
  • VirtualHexapod
• The Inverse Kinematics Algorithm used for this project
• How to find the orientation of the hexapod with respect to the ground given we know all the orientations of the six legs with respect to the robot's body.
  • Algorithm 1 when we know which of the three points of each leg could contact the ground
  • Algorithm 2 when we don't know which of points of which legs could be in contact with the ground
• How to make the hexapod step on the correct target ground contacts
• How to determine if the hexapod should twist and by how much
  • find_if_might_twist
  • find_twist_frame

🕷️ Screenshots

🕷️ Notes

• Now live on https://hexapod-robot-simulator.herokuapp.com ! BUT (and a big one) I highly suggest that you run it locally. When run locally, it's pretty speedy! On the other hand, the link above is barely usable. Might convert this to to be a fully client-side Javascript app later, maybe?

• This implementation uses matrices, NOT quaternions. I'm aware that quaternions is far superior in every single way. In the (un)forseeable future, maybe?

• Honestly, My IK algorithm is just something I came up with based on what I remember back in college plus browsing through the Mathematics Stack Exchange. It's just the most intuitive that I can think of. If you want something closer to the state-of-the-art, maybe checkout Unity's Fast IK or ROS IKFast.

• I believe that the idea that it's best if we are kind to one another shouldn't be controversial. And I shouldn't be afraid to say that.

🤗 Contributors

• @mithi
• @philippeitis
• @mikong