A Study of Design and Control of a Quadruped Walking Vehicle

Abstract

The paper addresses some of the fundamental problems of energy efficiency, design, and adaptive gait control of quadru ped walking vehicles. The design principle of a leg called a gravitationally decoupled actuator ( GDA) is shown to be indispensable for realizing energetically efficient walking mo tion. A novel mechanism, the three-dimensional Cartesian- coordinate pantograph ( PANTOMEC), which follows the GDA principle and has a lightweight structure, is introduced. A constructed quadruped walking vehicle model is then de scribed : the walking vehicle has the PANTOMEC leg mecha nisms, eight tactile sensors and a posture detector, and is hierarchically controlled by a microcomputer. Comparatively high energy efficiency and a certain degree of terrain adapt ability is demonstrated. It is thus shown that a practical walking vehicle can be designed using the proposed method. The adaptive gait control problem is formalized, and an algorithm for terrain-adaptive gait control is presented. By computer simulation, it is shown that the algorithm produces an efficient gait while avoiding "deadlock" positions in nego tiating terrain. The algorithm is shown to be applicable for the control of future quadruped walking vehicles with visual sensors.

Reduced DOF Type Walking Robot Based on Closed Link Mechanism

“…GDA (Gravitationally Decoupled Actuation) and MDA (Motion Decoupled Actuation) are the most famous of the techniques. The GDA is a concept to avoid energy loss that is generated by interference of actuations (Hirose 1984). Then, the notion of the MDA is to make a purpose of actuation clear (Koyachi et al 1991).…”

Force Sensing for Multi-Legged Walking Robots: Theory and Experiments Part 1: Overview and Force Sensing

“…During the 80ies several four-legged machines have been developed which where controlled by a simple steering of the machines body, e.g., Titan 1-1V (Fig. 2.8) (Hirose, 1984), PV 11 (Hirose & Umetani, 1980), and Collie (Miura et al, 1985;Emura & Arakawa, 1991). The Titan series and the PV-11 are four-legged machines with an insect-like leg construction.…”

“…The legs are special pantograph mechanisms. A larger model (weight about 150 kg) with similar kinematics has been elaborated and tested (Hirose & Umetani, 1980;Hirose, 1984;Umetani et al, 1985). In 1985, the Laboratory of mechanical Engineering (Japan) designed an electromechanical walking robot MELWALK3.…”

Terrain Classification Using Weakly-Structured Vehicle/Terrain Interaction

“…In the simplest case, tactile sensors detect the presence or absence of terrain, for example in Hirose's seminal work on control of a quadruped walker (Hirose, 1984), or in (Espenschied et al, 1996), in which a robot traversed a slatted surface. Other sensors can be used to estimate compliance or slope of the terrain for adaptive locomotion, as shown in (Wettergreen et al, 1995;Lewis and Bekey, 2002;Kurazume et al, 2002;Cham et al, 2004), to name a few.…”