The Basic Study of the Intelligent Gait Control for Quadrupedal Walking Vehicle

It is generally recognized that the walking machine will make superior off road vehicle to conventional wheeled or tracked vehicles. The high mobility of walking vehicle come from its intelligent functions to select gait adaptive to the terrain. If the legged vehicle is without the intelligence and the legs are driven in fixed sequence, it can not even maintain stable motion in rough terrain. Thus the intelligent gait control problem is said tc be crucial in the developement of legged vehicle. But only a few studies have been performed on the intelligence of hexapod walking and not a single study have been implemented on quadruped walking. The difficulties to construct the hardware of walking vehicle itself might have been the greatest obstacles for it. The authors have already constructed a quadruped walking vehicle (Perambulating Vehicle Mark II, abbreviated as PV II) and successfully demonstrated its fundamental mobilities. To set the PV II as a object model this paper makes the first attempt to analyse the intelligent gait control problem. The paper includes a complete problem formalization, clarification and analysis of the gait control algorithm, and the evaluation of the proposed algorithm in terms of a computer simulation study.