−− Range images have a key role for surface mapping in robot navigation and control. The robot control system can easily identify objects and obstacles by manipulating range images, however most of these range images are acquired in perspective projection, thus object position may be incorrect due to distortion caused by the perspective effect. This paper proposes an easy and efficient way to a...

General gait design for a walking robot has an assumption that the weight of a leg is negligible compared to that of body. Under the assumption, only the gravity center of the body is taken into consideration in the gait design since the total gravity center of whole robot coincides always with the gravity center of the body only. Roughly speaking, however, motion of a weighty leg has serious i...

For a robot in a dynamic environment, the ability to detect motion is crucial. Motion often indicates areas of the robot’s surroundings that are changing, contain another agent, or are otherwise worthy of attention. Although legs are arguably the most versatile means of locomotion for a robot, and thus the best suited to an unknown or changing domain, existing methods for motion detection eithe...

In this paper we suggest a novel method to approximate the fitness function of a genetic programming approach in order to develop fast and stable gait patterns for a quadruped robot. Therefore, gait patterns are classified by so called Signal Space Detectors. We show how a Signal Space Detector can extract information about the reliability of a classification. Finally, we demonstrate how this i...

A trend in robotics is towards legged robots. One of the issues with legged robots is the development of gaits. Typically gaits are developed manually. In this paper we report our results of autonomous evolution of dynamic gaits for the Sony Quadruped Robot. Fitness is determined using the robot's digital camera and infrared sensors. Using this system we evolve faster dynamic gaits than previou...

This paper presents a modular approach to the development of an interactive software environment for gait generation and control design of Sony legged robots. A number of modules have been developed for monitoring robot states, gait generation, control design and image processing. A dynamic model of the leg and wheel-like motion are proposed to combine both wheeled and legged properties to prod...

Cheetahs exhibit extreme mobility not only in running speed, but also in agility. In particularly, tail-assistive maneuver in chase of a gazelle shows the potential usage of tail in robotic quadruped as well. This talk presents several examples of appendage-assisted dynamic balance in nature along with hypothesized principles. Although the benefits of using additional limbs to augment the agili...

This article addresses the issues of colour classification and collision detection as they occur in the legged league robot soccer environment of RoboCup. We show how the method of one-class classification with support vector machines (SVMs) can be applied to solve these tasks satisfactorily using the limited hardware capacity of the prescribed Sony AIBO quadruped robots. The experimental evalu...