Walking mechanism for a lion-type robot

Abstract

This paper describes a new type of locomotion for a quadruped robot. Recently, many biomimetic quadruped robots have been developed. Most of them use many actuators for running, which causes them to become big in size. We have developed a medium-sized quadruped robot by using only one electric motor as an actuator for walking and running. We also adapt to the robot the mechanism which is similar to Theo Jansen mechanism to make its gait biomimetic. In order to realize our mechanism, we propose “Modified Gallop Gait” that is derived from bounce gait and gallop gait. The experimental results show that the robot runs as the modified gallop gait at the velocity of 0.89 m/s, while its pitch angle oscillates periodically to realize biomimetic motion and its stable running.