Omnidirectional Static Walking of a Quadruped Robot on a Slope

Abstract

We propose successive gait transition with arbitrary body posture to enable a quadruped robot to walk statically and omnidirectionally on a slope. Body posture is determined by rotation around 3 axes, roll, pitch, and yaw. Successive gait transition with a minimum number of steps on a slope is realizable using common foot position before and after gait transition. The time required to transit between gaits is reduced by carefully designing foot position in crawling and rotating while limiting foot reachable region on a slope. The robot thus walks into any direction with arbitrary body postures. In this study, we also verify a tradeoff relation between motion speed and body posture. Computer simulation and experiments verified the feasibility of our proposed method and the stability of gait transition based on static stability margin.