LAURON VP, A Six-Legged Walking Robot, with a New ROS 2-Based Behavior Control

Hexapods have the ability to exert a strange fascination on humans. Once working with such a system, they develop a personality, and engineers create a special bond with the robot. Emerging from such a bond, LAURON V requires some upgrades to remain a future-proof system and to further prove its unused potential. Those changes contain new motor controllers but, more importantly, a reimplementation of the behavior network in an up-to-date framework. Therefore, an approach is developed on how to model behavior networks using ROS 2. This approach is then tested on the updated robot LAURON VP. With the ability to use the same software stack with only a different option during startup to run either on the robot or in simulation, testing new features becomes effortless.