For legged locomotion, animals and humans rely more on decentralized feedback control than on the central control approach common in humanoid robotics. We present evidence that the decentralization does not hamper fidelity and may present an alternative approach to robust locomotion of legged robots from prosthesis to humanoids. Keywords-locomotion, decentralized control, bioinspiration

In current RoboCup four-legged league the robots rely only on coloured landmarks for localisation. It is intended to remove these landmarks in a few years, as happened in other leagues. The odometry of four-legged robots is extremely unreliable and there is a high uncertainty in robot motion. Therefore, sensor-based localization is necessary. We propose to extend our previous technique for fuzz...

The factor graph framework is a convenient modeling technique for robotic state estimation and sensor fusion where states are represented as nodes and measurements are modeled as factors. In designing a sensor fusion framework using factor graphs for legged robots, one often has access to visual, inertial, encoders, and contact sensors. While visualinertial odometry has been studied extensively...

Kinematic models of legged robots are stratified, i.e. the equations of motion differ on different strata. An improved version of the motion planning algorithm proposed in the literature is compared with two alternative solutions via the example of the six-legged (hexapod) robot. The first alternative uses explicit integration of the vector fields while the second one exploits the flatness of a...

Over the last few years there have been great developments and improvements in the mobile robotics field, oriented to replace human operators especially in dangerous tasks, such as mine-sweeping operations, rescuing after earthquakes or other catastrophic events, fire-fighting operations, working inside nuclear power stations and exploration of unknown environments. Different locomotion systems...

This paper describes the kinematic design issues of a modular reconfigurable parallel robot. Two types of robot modules, the fixed-dimension joint modules and the variable dimension link modules that can be custom-designed rapidly, are used to facilitate the complex design effort. Module selection and robot configuration enumeration are discussed. The kinematic analysis of modular parallel robo...

Manual design of motion patterns for legged robots is difficult task often with suboptimal results. To automate this process variety of approaches have been tried including various evolutionary algorithms. In this work we present an algorithm capable of generating viable motion patterns for multi-legged robots. This algorithm consists of two evolutionary algorithms working in co-evolution. The ...

The Osaka Legged Robot Team, BabyTigers-98, attended the First Sony Legged Robot Competition and Demonstration which was held at La Cite La Villeta, a science and technology museum in Paris in conjunction with the second Robot Soccer World Cup, RoboCup-98, July, 1998. This article describes our approach to the competition. The main feature of our system is to apply a direct teaching method to b...

The objective of this paper is to present the evolution and the state-of-theart in the area of legged locomotion systems. In a first phase different possibilities for mobile robots are discussed, namely the case of artificial legged locomotion systems, while emphasizing their advantages and limitations. In a second phase an historical overview of the evolution of these systems is presented, bea...

A goal of robotics has been to develop mechanisms that have the efficiency and speed of wheeled robots with the terrain flexibility of legged robots. In previous work, we have proposed a unique three-legged mechanism, the rotopod, designed to integrate these two useful approaches to locomotion. In this paper, we present an analysis of the variety of gaits that can be exhibited by the rotopod. W...