R ABBIT is a bipedal robot specifically designed to advance the fundamental understanding of controlled legged locomotion. The motivation for studying walking robots arises from diverse sociological and commercial interests, ranging from the desire to replace humans in hazardous occupations (demining, nuclear power plant inspection, military interventions, etc.) to the restoration of motion in ...

We present a novel locomotion strategy called legless locomotion that allows a round-bodied legged robot to locomote approximately when it is high-centered. Typically, a high-centered robot is stuck since the robot’s legs do not touch the ground. Legless locomotion uses the legs as a reaction mass to set up oscillatory body rotations which when coupled with ground contact gradually translate th...

In this paper, a new waist-trunk system has been proposed for a humanoid robot by using parallel architectures. The structure of human torso and its function have been used as inspirations for design purposes. The proposed waist-trunk system consists of a 3 legged UPS orientation parallel platform and a 6 legged UPS parallel platform which are connected together in a serial architecture. A 3D m...

as a robot could be stable statically standing on three or more legs, a six legged walking robot can be highly flexible in movements and perform different missions without dealing with serious kinematic and dynamic problems. an experimental six legged walking robot with 18 degrees of freedom is studied and built in this paper. the kinematic and gait analysis formulations are demonstrated by an e...

The path generation for legged locomotion systems is di cult in that the legged motion must be considered together with the body movement. Owing to the large searching space resulted from the combination of leg movement and terrain condition, it is quite time consuming to produce an optimal result of body trajectory planning. In this paper, an e ective method of body trajectory planning is intr...

Dynamic legged locomotion entails navigating unstructured terrain at high speed. The discontinuous foot-fall patterns and flight phases, which are pivotal for its unrivaled mobility, introduce large impulses and extended free-falls that serve to destabilize motion estimation. In a nod to biological systems, visual information, in the form of optical flow, is used with a hybrid estimator tuned t...

Design insight into steady–state locomotion requires careful analysis of the dynamics within and transitions among the combinatorially many possible contact conditions that a legged robot will experience. To that end the self–manipulation formalism, originally intended to aid in the analysis of dynamical transitions, leans on the well established manipulation literature to systematically popula...

This paper describes a method to achieve a visioncued swaying task in unknown environments utilizing adaptive visual servoing. The proposed method has a hybrid structure consisting of a controller to keep the distances between feet constant (a stance servoing controller), and an adaptive visual servoing controller. Making use of the method, the motion of each joint need not be pre-programmed, b...

Contact-based decision and planning methods are increasingly being sought for task execution in humanoid robots. Formal methods for verification and synthesis have not been yet incorporated into the motion planning sequence to generate complex mobility behaviors in legged humanoid robots. This study takes a step toward formally synthesizing a high-level reactive task planner for unified legged ...