serdarselimys/hexadogzbd-pybulletdemo

This project is a computer simulation of a six legged walking robot called HexaDog ZBD. It runs inside PyBullet, a physics simulator, and lets someone drive the virtual robot around using either an Xbox style joystick or a keyboard, watching all six legs move with a realistic tripod walking pattern in a 3D window. Underneath, each leg's position is worked out using inverse kinematics, meaning the code figures out the right joint angles needed to place each foot where it should go. Walking speed and step size come from a lookup table stored in a CSV file, and the simulation smoothly blends between different movement styles, such as walking straight, sideways, diagonally, or spinning in place, depending on which direction the stick is pushed. A right or left trigger on the controller raises or lowers the robot's body height. The console also prints the walking speed and step frequency once per gait cycle so someone can see how fast the robot is moving. To run it, someone needs Python between versions 3.9 and 3.11, since PyBullet installs most reliably in that range. After cloning the repository, the README walks through creating an isolated Python virtual environment, installing dependencies like PyBullet, pandas, numpy, and pygame, and then running the main simulation script from the project's root folder. A troubleshooting section covers common problems, like the robot's 3D meshes failing to load, a joystick not being detected, or the robot twitching if the gait CSV file has missing values. The project is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0, meaning anyone can remix or build on the design for non-commercial purposes as long as they give credit, but commercial use of any kind is not allowed.