The goal of this research project is the achievement of a new comprehensive understanding of hexapods. In the first part of the project, a new concept for calculating the degree of freedom (DOF) of the robot shall be formulated, which takes different linear drives (hydraulic, electric), guidances (with and without linear guide), and joint combinations (universal joint, spherical joint, double joint) into account. In the second part of the project, a new and comprehensive sensor system for detecting the position and orientation (pose) of a common hexapod using inertial sensors shall be developed. This sensor system will then be used for our two-legged walking robot CENTAUROB. In the third part of the project, the goal is to transform the kinematics of the CENTAUROB into a quaternion formulation to reduce computational time and rounding errors during movement.With this research project, the DOF calculation problem for complex parallel robots as well as the forward kinematics problem will be solved.