The article presents a survey of sensors relevant for mobile robot navigation and their sensing principles. The sensors surveyed include range sensors, inertial systems and positioning systems. There are many applications, from different sectors that could profit from this type of technology: autonomous mobile platforms for materials handling in industry, warehouses, hospitals, etc.; forestry c...

Gait generation is the formulation and selection of a sequence of coordinated leg and body motions that propel a legged robot along a desired path. Approaches to gait generation can be classified into control, behavioral, rule-based, and constraintbased paradigms. We survey these models of gait generation and introduce the Ambler, a hexapod robot that can circulate its legs to produce unique ga...

We propose a locomotion technique for a legged robot that is high-centered, i.e., a robot stuck on a block with its legs dangling in air. By using its legs as reaction masses, the robot might be able to rock and roll on its stomach and incrementally move forward off the block, a form of legless locomotion using halteres. With locomotion of high-centered robots using body attitude oscillations a...

We present a general method for determining controllability of a class of kinematic legged robots. The method is general in that it is independent of the robot’s morphology; in particular, it does not depend upon the number of legs. Our method is based on an extension of a nonlinear controllability test for smooth systems to the legged case, where the relevant mechanics are not smooth. Our exte...

We study the problem of computing the free space F of a simple legged robot called the spider robot. The body of this robot is a single point and the legs are attached to the body. The robot is subject to two constraints: each leg has a maximal extension R (accessibility constraint) and the body of the robot must lie above the convex hull of its feet (stability constraint). Moreover, the robot ...

Insects provide good models for the design and control of mission capable legged robots. We are using intelligent biological inspiration to extract the features important for locomotion from insect neuromechanical designs and implement them into legged robots. Each new model in our series of robots represents an advance in agility, strength, or energy efficiency, which are all important for per...

The paper introduces the Switching Four-bar Mechanism (sfm), a new low-dimensional kinematic abstraction forminiature legged robots, aimed at quasi-static motion planning in the horizontal plane. The model comprises a rigid torso and four rigid legs which engage in an alternating tetrapod gait. As the gait is executed, the torso and the legs form two switching four-bar linkages, parameterized b...