Abstract
In this study, we discovered a phenomenon in which a quadruped robot without any sensors or microprocessor can autonomously generate the various gait patterns of animals using actuator characteristics and select the gaits according to the speed. The robot has one DC motor on each limb and a slider-crank mechanism connected to the motor shaft. Since each motor is directly connected to a power supply, the robot only moves its foot on an elliptical trajectory under a constant voltage. Although this robot does not have any computational equipment such as sensors or microprocessors, when we applied a voltage to the motor, each limb begins to adjust its gait autonomously and finally converged to a steady gait pattern. Furthermore, by raising the input voltage from the power supply, the gait changed from a pace to a half-bound, according to the speed, and also we observed various gait patterns, such as a bound or a rotary gallop. We investigated the convergence property of the gaits for several initial states and input voltages and have described detailed experimental results of each gait observed.
Highlights
Most of the legged animals have the ability to adaptively select their gait patterns according to their speed (Alexander, 1984)
Since each motor is directly connected to a power supply, the robot only moves its foot on an elliptical trajectory under a constant voltage
We investigated the convergence property of the gaits for several initial states and input voltages and describe detailed experimental results of each gait observed
Summary
Most of the legged animals have the ability to adaptively select their gait patterns according to their speed (Alexander, 1984). As a robot that generate multiple motion patterns, a quadruped walking robot (Owaki and Ishiguro, 2017), which uses a reflexive rule described by an oscillator model, generated various gait patterns, such as walk, trot, and gallop, depending on the speed, using only physical (nonneural) interactions between the limbs. These experiments suggest that the physical interactions between the limbs through the body and the ground play a greater role in the generation of adaptive gait. The analysis of the synchronization phenomenon of multiple DC motors in fundamental systems is described in Masuda et al, 2017a
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