Gait analysis for six-legged robots

Abstract

We present a general method for the analysis of the gaits used by a six-legged robot independently of the mechanism used to generate the gait. The gait state of the robot is defined as a function of the last executed steps and several classes of gait states as well as the transitions between them are identified. As an example, we apply our method to the well-know wave gaits (the most efficient and stable gaits for straight line locomotion on flat terrain) showing interesting properties about how they can be generated, the relation between all the possible wave gaits and about the emergence of the tripod gait under certain assumptions likely to hold when walking on flat terrain. 1 Introduction In the last years there has been a growing interest in the area of leggeds robots. This increasing interest is justified by the fact that a legged robot is able to deal with very irregular terrain in which wheeled robots are unable to move. Since the main part of the outdoor environments are con...