Despite the impressive demonstrations of energy efficient legged robots in the past, there are still a number of challenges remained to compete with legged locomotion of biological systems. In order to optimize energy efficiency of a legged robot, we typically need to sacrifice versatility: our robots have usually limited locomotion speed, lack of behavioral diversity, complex mechanical design...

The design of legged robots has long drawn on nature for inspiration. However, few of these robots exhibit the speed and robustness seen in even the simplest of animals. This paper presents the design and fabrication of a novel class of six-legged running robots based on biologicallyinspired functional principles. We first describe recent findings in biological research that motivate our robots...

This paper shows how efficient object oriented dynamics modeling and optimal control techniques form the basis for generating optimal gaits for four-legged and biped robots. Dynamics of walking robots, dynamics algorithms and our object-oriented approach are shortly repeated as well as optimal control techniques. Numerical and experimental results for a four-legged and a humanoid robot are cited.

Sony has provided a remarkable platform for re search and development in robotic agents namely fully autonomous legged robots In this paper we describe our work using Sony s legged robots to participate at the RoboCup legged robot demonstration and com petition Robotic soccer represents a very challenging environment for research into systems with multiple robots that need to achieve concrete o...

Robots are indispensable today to improve process efficiencies and labor savings in the industry and service sector. The importance of robots has also been recognized for work in critical environment, such as, space, ocean bottom, power plants, as well as, in the fields of clinical medicine, hazard prevention, etc. For this, a large number of robots have been developed, and researchers continue...

Recently, the development of intelligent robots has benefited from a deeper understanding of the biomechanics and neurology of biological systems. Researchers have proposed the concept of Central Pattern Generators (CPGs) as a mechanism for generating an efficient control strategy for legged robots based on biological locomotion principles. Although many studies ha...

We report here on a new technique to evaluate autonomous mobile robots built for exploring rugged terrain such as is found on planetary surfaces. The dynamics of both wheeled and legged robots interacting with deformable soil (sand) and obstacles are notoriously complex and nonlinear. This paper introduces a novel statistical methodology for the evaluation of such robots. We report on work in p...