Autonomous Hexapod Robot Development for Search, Rescue, and Surveillance Operations

This paper describes the design and development of an autonomous hexapod robot designed to be deployed for search, rescue and surveillance activities in situations where conventional wheeled or tracked robots would be inadequate. In our effort to leverage the modular control architecture of ArduPilot and the navigation intelligence found in autonomous vehicles such as Tesla, we have developed a software framework that allows real-time locomotion, perception and autonomous decision making. The hexapod platform has eighteen degrees of freedom, onboard AI (using NVIDIA Jetson ORIN [18]) and a sensor suite of LiDAR, camera, IMU and thermal modules. Through a custom control stack that manages interactions, leg coordination, adaptive gait switching, obstacle avoidance, terrain mapping, and autonomous path planning are integrated in these components. Field trials demonstrated the robot's capacity to cross rugged terrain and localize a human target by using thermal and visual cues and to remotely transmit environmental data over a secure telemetry link.