Reactive gait generation for varying speed and direction

Abstract

We address the problem of gait generation for a six-legged robot walking on irregular terrain and subject to changes in speed and direction commanded by a human driver or by an independent, higher-level decision process. 1 Introduction A fundamental issue in the control of a walking robot is that of gait generation, that is, the determination of the movement each leg must perform to follow a desired trajectory. In the particular case of a straight line trajectory on completely flat ground, gait generation reduces, in practice, to the determination of a gait pattern, which involves only the relative times at which each leg leaves and reaches the ground or, more precisely, the relative times at which each leg begins its recover and support phases. The most popular strategy used to achieve statically stable walking with legged robots is to adopt one of the wave gaits, a well known family of gait patterns characterized by a back to front sequence of leg protractions on each side of the ro...