Hiwonder miniHexa: Small Frame, Big Power

To bring more agility and expressive motion to this tiny hexapod, Hiwonder miniHexa integrates 18 high-speed servos with built-in stall protection. They are evenly distributed across its 6 legs, providing each leg with one horizontal rotation and 2 vertical lift servos for a total of 3 degrees of freedom.

The body is built from lightweight 6000-series aluminum alloy, and the top structure features an open design with multiple expansion holes ready for customization. Despite its compact size, miniHexa adopts a bionic leg structure inspired by real insects, packing the capabilities of a full-sized hexapod into a small frame.

Hiwonder miniHexa robot is equipped with advanced inverse kinematics algorithms, allowing you to set the end coordinates of each leg. The system calculates the corresponding servo angles through inverse kinematics, which means you can control the robot's movement while simultaneously adjusting its height, tilt, or turning radius in real time. This enables seamless combination of multiple actions and infinite fine-tuning, making calibration more intuitive and control more flexible.

miniHexa deeply integrates principles of bionics and supports autonomous switching between typical tripod and ripple gaits. Insects of the hexapod class naturally divide their 6 legs into two groups when walking, and miniHexa faithfully mimics this hexapod walking pattern.

As miniHexa moves, you'll see that it shifts one group of three legs at a time. Each group consists of the front and rear leg on one side paired with the middle leg on the opposite side, forming a tripod that supports the body. At any moment, only one tripod is in motion. With a footprint ratio of 0.5 across its six legs, this demonstrates the classic tripod gait typical of hexapod robots.

When the footprint ratio exceeds 0.5, four legs take turns supporting the body, forming what's known as a ripple gait. miniHexa can seamlessly switch between tripod and ripple gaits, giving you flexible control over its movement — a feature that makes it truly impressive.

miniHexa's capabilities go far beyond movement. With the WonderEcho voice interaction module, it listens and talks. The module features a dedicated neural network processor and supports custom wake words and command sets, allowing you to interact with it through natural voice conversation and easily create engaging AI voice interaction projects.

By adding the high-performance ESP32-S3 AI vision module, miniHexa also gains the ability to observe and recognize. It can detect and track faces, colors, and specific objects in real time, enabling WiFi video streaming, visual line following, target tracking, and other exciting computer vision features, letting you see the world through your robot's eyes. From voice to vision, miniHexa makes advanced human robot interaction simple, engaging, and full of creative possibilities.

miniHexa comes with a versatile and user-friendly expansion system, perfect for bringing your creative ideas to life. Expansion kit integrates the ESP32-S3 vision module, touch sensor, infrared obstacle avoidance sensors, LED dot matrix display, and WonderEcho voice interaction module. With all modules working together, miniHexa makes it easy to set up smart applications like precise infrared obstacle avoidance, interactive touch controls, real-time distance display, and fall prevention. MiniHexa lets you mix and match sensors and AI modules to quickly build projects your way, unlocking endless creative possibilities.

There is a user-friendly visual PC software specifically for miniHexa. No coding skills are required to precisely manage every step of the robot. The software features a graphical action editor, supporting visual calibration and performance optimization, so you can easily create and fine-tune movements. Paired with the dedicated app, take control of miniHexa from your phone, and watch it navigate seamlessly in any indoor or outdoor space.

miniHexa may be small, but it's bursting with intelligent possibilities. From precise inverse kinematics and versatile walking gaits to open-ended multimodal AI interactions, from seamless cross-platform control to a fully open-source architecture, it truly lowers the barrier for creating and experimenting with hexapod robots.