Hysteresis in gait transition induced by changing waist joint stiffness of a quadruped robot driven by nonlinear oscillators with phase resetting

Abstract

In this paper, we investigated the locomotion of a quadruped robot whose front and rear bodies are connected by a roll joint. The legs of the robot are controlled by nonlinear oscillators with phase resetting. Based on numerical simulations, we showed that the robot produces various gait patterns through dynamical interactions among the robot mechanical system, oscillator control system, and environment and establishes gait transition induced by the change of the roll joint stiffness. In addition, we demonstrated that a hysteresis with respect to gait pattern occurs during the gait transition similarly to humans and animals, and we examined the mechanisms of the hysteresis from a dynamic viewpoint.