Development of a Quadruped Walking Robot TITAN XI for Steep Slope Operation - Step Over Gait to Avoid Concrete Frames on Steep Slopes -

Abstract

We detail a step over gait for a quadruped walking robot that maintains a continuous walking with sufficient stability margin for avoiding ferroconcrete reinforcement frames covering steep slopes. For this gait, the robot must adapt itself to terrain and step over these frames. We propose a terrain-adaptive gait based on an intermittent crawl gait using map information. After introducing the gait control algorithm, we show results of graphical simulation to verify the proposed algorithm. Then, these discussions are established by walking experiments using the developed quadruped walking robot named TITAN XI.

Review article: locomotion systems for ground mobile robots in unstructured environments

“…One example is Titan XI, developed by the Hirose-Fukushima Robotics Lab (Fig. 5c) for consolidating rocky slopes (mass: 7000 kg; length of the hydraulically actuated legs: 3.7 m; Hodoshima et al, 2007).…”

Optimal impedance control based on body inertia for a hydraulically driven hexapod robot walking on uneven and extremely soft terrain

“…The latest version, COMET-IV (see Figure 1), is hydraulically driven, and the targeted environment is a large-scale, rough area. COMET-IV is different from the robotic systems developed by Galvez, Estremera, and Santos (2003), Hodoshima et al (2007), Lehtinen (1994), Nabulasi, Armada, and Montes (2006), and Raibert, Blankespoor, Nelson, Playter, and The BigDog Team (2008) in regard to the number of DOF, the number of legs, the structure design, and driver devices; thus, the approaches used to find a solution to stability problems are also different. Furthermore, with heavy machines such as COMET-IV, which weighs approximately 3 tons ( ∼ =2,950 kg), a relatively even, small-inclination ground surface (3-5 cm) does not greatly affect its overall stability because the minimum force delivery on each robot's foot at the very first touch to ground is required to be at least 1 kN.…”

Adaptive Impedance Control with Compliant Body Balance for Hydraulically Driven Hexapod Robot

“…In terms of legged-robots system structure and configurations, different scale and different number of degree of freedom (DOF) of each leg makes each research, and solutions has different goal and approaches. Such as ROBOCLIMBER [8], MECANT [9] and TITAN-XI [10] are different to the SILO [7] and AMRU [11] on a size, capacity and actuator system. Chiba University Operating Mine Detection Electronics Tools (COMET) version IV (COMET-IV) was developed and have a same actuator/driven system as [8], [9] and [10] but different on overall configuration of structures as shown in Figure 1.…”

“…Such as ROBOCLIMBER [8], MECANT [9] and TITAN-XI [10] are different to the SILO [7] and AMRU [11] on a size, capacity and actuator system. Chiba University Operating Mine Detection Electronics Tools (COMET) version IV (COMET-IV) was developed and have a same actuator/driven system as [8], [9] and [10] but different on overall configuration of structures as shown in Figure 1. As its name implies, the application is focused on the wide range of daunting task such as land-mine detection and as rescue tool at disaster area.…”