An Analog CMOS Circuit for Locomotion Control in Quadruped Walking Robot

We propose an analog CMOS circuit for developing a biologically-inspired locomotion controller for a quadruped walking robot. The proposed circuit is based on the biological neural network, called the central pattern generator (CPG), that can generate rhythmic movements for locomotion of animals, such as walking, running, swimming, and flying. We constructed a CPG model from the WilsonCowan neural oscillators, and implement it as analog integrated circuit that can perform parallel processing essentially. Furthermore, we fabricated a test chip in standard CMOS technology. By experiments on the test chip, we have shown that the proposed circuit has capability to generate stable rhythmic patterns for locomotion control in a quadruped walking robot.