Adaptive gait pattern control of a quadruped locomotion robot

Abstract

The authors have proposed a control system of a quadruped locomotion robot by using nonlinear oscillators. It is composed of a leg motion controller and a gait pattern controller. The leg motion controller drives the actuators of the legs by using local feedback control. The gait pattern controller involves nonlinear oscillators with mutual interactions. In this paper, capability of adaptation of the proposed control system against variance of the environment is verified through numerical simulations and hardware experiments: With the input signals from the touch sensors at the tips of the legs, the nonlinear oscillators tune the phase differences among them through mutual entrainments. As a result, a gait pattern corresponding to the states of the system or to the properties of the environment emerges. And the robot changes its gait pattern adaptively to variance of the environment and establishes a stable locomotion while suppressing the energy consumption.

Biologically inspired adaptive walking of a quadruped robot

“…A great deal of the previous research on this attempted to generate walking using a neural system model, including studies on dynamic walking in simulation (Taga et al 1991;Ijspeert 2001;Tomita & Yano 2003) and real robots (Ilg et al 1999;Kimura et al 1999;Tsujita et al 2001;Lewis et al 2003). But autonomously adaptive dynamic walking on irregular terrain was rarely realized in those earlier studies except for our studies using quadruped robots called 'Patrush' (Kimura et al 1999(Kimura et al , 2001) and 'Tekken1' (Fukuoka et al 2003).…”

Spinal Information Processing and its Application to Motor Learning Support

“…Studies focusing on the neuromuscular system are well known in walking robot control [13][14][15][16][17] and estimation of arm posture from surface EMG signals [18,19]. We have proposed extracting motor features based on the structure of the human neuromuscular system by dividing the whole-body motion pattern into basic patterns by nerve.…”

Gait Transition from Quadrupedal to Bipedal Locomotion of an Oscillator-driven Biped Robot

“…These gait patterns originally have poor stability, and the transition requires drastic changes in robot posture, which aggravates the difficulty of establishing the transition without falling over. Our previous work developed a simple control system using nonlinear oscillators by focusing on CPG characteristics that are used for both quadruped and biped robots, revealing that they achieved steady and robust walking verified by numerical simulations and hardware experiments (Aoi & Tsuchiya, 2005;Aoi et al, 2004;Tsujita et al, 2001). In this paper, we use the same developed control system for both quadrupedal and bipedal locomotion of a biped robot and attempt to establish smooth gait transition.…”

“…CPGs modulate signal generation in response to sensory signals, resulting in adaptive motions. CPGs are widely modeled using nonlinear oscillators (Taga et al, 1991;Taga, 1995a,b), and based on such CPG models many walking robots and their control systems have been developed, in particular, for quadruped robots (Fukuoka et al, 2003;Lewis & Bekey, 2002;Tsujita et al, 2001), multi-legged robots (Akimoto et al, 1999;Inagaki et al, 2003), snake-like robots (Ijspeert et al, 2005;Inoue et al, 2004), and biped robots (Aoi & Tsuchiya, 2005;Aoi et al, 2004;Lewis et al, 2003;Nakanishi et al, 2004). This paper deals with the transition from quadrupedal to bipedal locomotion of a biped robot while walking.…”