While the current progress in actuation schemes, sensor setups, and mechanical design allows the development of increasingly performing legged robots, motion planing and control of such systems still pose challenging problems. Our group contributes to the ongoing research by focusing on the calibration, state estimation, and perception of legged platforms. Especially in rough and unstructured t...

This paper presents an adaptive colour segmentation algorithm for Sony legged robots to play a football game. A Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is adopted to measure the current lighting condition and an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is implemented to produce a suitable General Color Detection (GCD) table. Off-line learning is conducted in color segmentation in order for Sony-legged robots to adapt...

In this paper an Energy Dissipation Rate Control (EDRC) method is introduced, which could provide stable walking or running gaits for legged robots. This method is realized by developing a semi-analytical pattern generation approach for a robot during each Single Support Phase (SSP). As yet, several control methods based on passive dynamic walking have been proposed by researchers to provide an...

Legged robots and animals can exhibit a variety of locomotory skills, trotting and walking being the most widely used modes of locomotion. Such behaviours are often defined with the overall stability of the system in mind and are inherently of periodic nature. Legged robots, possibly equipped with arms as well, in everyday scenarios, e.g. service or forestry/agriculture, will require also skill...

1. Motivation Legged robots will need to be fast, robust and efficient for real world applications. In this research, we aim to design a high speed bipedal running robot on 3D environments based on active tail stabilization method, Raptor 2 robot. 2. State of the Art Many legged robots have been studied and developed so far, but only a few robots have achieved stable fast legged locomotion. In ...

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 describes our studies in the legged robots research area and the development of the LegGen System, that is used to automatically create and control stable gaits for legged robots into a physically based simulation environment. The parameters used to control the robot are optimized using Genetic Algorithms (GA). Comparisons between different fitness functions were accomplished, indica...

Legged robots have the potential to travel where wheeled robots cannot. While legged robots have many advantages that improve their maneuverability, they are notoriously difficult to control. However, neuroevolution, which combines the nature-inspired fields of neural networks with evolutionary computation, has shown promise in this task. The aim of this paper is to extend prior work that intro...

There is broad agreement that elastic elements are similarly useful in legged robotic systems [1] as they are in nature [2]. The two primary ways of incorporating springs in the actuators of legged robots are to place them either in parallel or in series (Fig 1). While both types of actuator have been implemented in robots [3–5], it is still unclear which is the better choice from an energy con...

With the introduction of commercially available programmable legged robots, a generic software method for detection of abnormalities in the robots’ locomotion is required. Our approach is to gain satisfactory results using a bare minimum amount of hardware feedback; In most cases we are able detect faults using only the joint angle sensors. Methods for recognising several types of collision as ...