This paper presents the design and control of Q-Whex, an untethered, quasiwheeled hexapod robot. Q-Whex has only six actuators-one motor located at each hip-achieving mechanical simplicity that promotes reliable and robust operation in real-world tasks. All of the robot's mechanical parts are simply fabricated with carbon fiber plates, which makes the robot very easy to make. Q-Whex is capable of performing wheeled-like smooth rides over flat ground with a tripod gait, and thereby prevent the common problem of trunk fluctuations in legged-wheel robots. It is also able to traverse height variations well exceeding its trunk clearance. The performance of Q-Whex is evaluated in various scenarios, including driving and turning over flat terrains, ramp-riding, step-crossing, stairclimbing, and irregular terrain-traversing.
Quadruped robots working in jungles, mountains or factories should be able to move through challenging scenarios. In this paper, we present a control framework for quadruped robots walking over rough terrain. The planner plans the trajectory of the robot's center of gravity by using the normalized energy stability criterion, which ensures that the robot is in the most stable state. A contact detection algorithm based on the probabilistic contact model is presented, which implements eventbased state switching of the quadruped robot legs. And an on-line detection of contact force based on generalized momentum is also showed, which improves the accuracy of proprioceptive force estimation. A controller combining whole body control and virtual model control is proposed to achieve precise trajectory tracking and active compliance with environment interaction. Without any knowledge of the environment, the experiments of the quadruped robot SDUQuad-144 climbs over significant obstacles such as 38 cm high steps and 22.5 cm high stairs are designed to verify the feasibility of the proposed method.
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