Most human infants, before standing and walking on two feet, locomote on their four limbs. They can use a wide variety of locomotor patterns, but the most widespread one is alternated locomotion on hands and knees. Despite being the first locomotor pattern of humans, there are almost no quantitative information available on infants crawling. Since infants crawl only for a short time period of t...

Understanding and implementing the control mechanisms that animals use to robustly negotiate a variety of terrains at high speed remains an unsolved problem. Previous research has resulted in control of quadruped running over a range of low speeds or narrowly around a single high speed. Control over a range of both low and high speeds is difficult because a quadruped system is significantly mor...

Modular robots have the advantage of self-assembling into a large and complex structure to travel through territories beyond an individual robot’s capacity. A swarm mobile is combined mechanical interconnection joint actuation achieve linked or articular configuration. In this paper, enhance perception, docking capacity modular robots, parallel mechanism-based system onboard visual perception a...

We present the design of a novel compliant quadruped robot: Cheetahcub, and a series of locomotion experiments with fast trotting gaits. The robot’s leg configuration is based on a spring-loaded, pantograph mechanism with multiple segments. A dedicated open loop locomotion controller was derived and implemented. Experiments were run in simulation and in hardware on flat terrain and with a step-...

Morphological Design and Control of a Bio-Inspired, Structurally Compliant Quadruped

Robots with legs and arms have the potential to support humans in dangerous, dull or dirty tasks. A major motivation behind research on such robots is their potential versatility. However, these robots come at a high price in mechanical and control complexity. Hence, until they can demonstrate a clear advantage over their simpler counterparts, robots with arms and legs will not fulfill their tr...

While the dynamics of running arthropods have been modeled as a spring-mass system, no such structures have been discovered that store and return energy during bouncing. The hindleg of the cockroach Blaberus discoidalis is a good candidate for a passive, vertical leg spring because its vertically oriented joint axes of rotation limit the possibility of active movements and contributions of musc...

Roller-Walker is a leg-wheel hybrid mobile robot using a passive wheel equipped on the tip of each leg. The passive wheel can be transformed into sole mode by rotating the ankle roll joint when Roller-Walker walks on a rough terrain. This paper discusses energy efficiency of locomotion in wheeled mode. We define a leg trajectory to produce forward straight propulsion and discuss the relationshi...

Legged robot gait generation is a challenging task that involves the control of a large number of degrees of freedom (DOF’s) within a mechanical structure that varies during locomotion. A large number of motion parameters have to be considered in order to obtain a stable, natural and efficient locomotion. Legged robot locomotion applies nonlinear dynamical equations of high order with a multidi...

Quadruped robots have unique capabilities for motion over uneven natural environments. This article presents a stable gait for a quadruped robot in such motions and discusses the inverse-dynamics control scheme to follow the planned gait. First, an explicit dynamics model will be developed using a novel constraint elimination method for an 18-DOF quadruped robot. Thereafter, an inverse-dynamics...