A gait study for a one-leg-disabled hexapod robot

Abstract

—As a remarkably strong point of a hexapod walking robot, it is considered that even if one of the six legs is disabled, static walking may be maintained by the remaining five legs. However, to maintain the static stability at maximum, a gait study for five-legged walking is a necessary factor. Hence, this paper describes a method of gait study for such a situation. Since it is very difficult to find a suitable gait by use of an analytical method without any model, such as a model based on insects' walking, we employed a programming method with the help of recent powerful computers. Some devices are applied to reduce the number of computations. As a result, we have obtained two kinds of gaits which can maintain the gait stability margin at a high level for a duty factor in the range of 0.6β < 1.