Optimal fault tolerant gait sequence of the hexapod robot with overlapping reachable areas and crab walking

Abstract

This paper extends the authors' previous results on fault tolerant locomotion of the hexapod robot on even terrain by relaxing nonoverlap of redefined reachable cells of legs and considering crab walking. It is shown that in fault tolerant locomotion two adjacent legs of the hexapod robot can have overlapping redefined reachable cells with each other and consequently the stride length of the gaits is increased. Also, the optimal fault tolerant periodic gaits for hexapod robots to have the maximum stride length in one cycle in crab walking on even terrain are derived with distinct reachable cells. The derived sequence for crab walking has different orders of leg swing according to the relative values of the crab angle and some design parameters of the robot.