Digital compass as heading sensor for hexapod robot

A growing research in biomimetic legged robot design challenges today's theory path planning and motion control. For many reasons a biomimetic robot requires a heading sensor onboard for better path following and steering. We propose a use of a digital compass as low-cost sensor. However, cheap versions of that sensor are extremely sensitive to inclination that occurs due to locomotion, resulting in incorrect measurements. This paper presents a modeling procedure of a digital compass performance with respect to altered roll and pitch angles. With information from an additional accelerometer as tilt sensor that reads roll and pitch angles of the robot the model improves the compass readings making it insensitive to altered tilt. The fusion of the modeling and a compass-accelerometer setup is experimentally verified