PDAC-Based Brachiating Control of the Multi-Locomotion Robot

Abstract

This paper introduces the multi-locomotion robot which has multiple types of locomotion at first. The robot has been developed to achieve a bipedal walk, a quadrupedal walk, and a brachiation, mimicking locomotion ways of a gorilla. It therefore has higher mobility by selecting a proper locomotion type according to its environment and purpose. When we consider a transition motion connecting one locomotion form to another, two designed controllers corresponding to each locomotion type are not enough. A new control algorithm that covering control properties of two locomotion controllers should be developed, because the intermediate motion cannot be realized by fusing control outputs from two controllers. Previously, based on this notion, we have proposed a novel method named Passive Dynamic Autonomous Control (PDAC) that realized not only a bipedal walk but also a quadruped walk. In this paper, the PDAC is also applied to a brachiation motion on the irregular ladder; then the proposed controller is validated by the experiment.Keywordsmulti-locomotion robotbrachiationPDACmotion control