Coupled Van Der Pol oscillators utilised as Central pattern generators for quadruped locomotion

Abstract

Central pattern generators (CPGs) inspired from neural system of animal are widely used for the control of locomotion in robots. The objective of this paper is to modeling a CPG-network formed by a set of mutually coupled Van Der Pol (VDP) oscillators to generating rhythmic movement patterns for multi-joint robot. Firstly, a VDP-CPG network is made up by four coupled VDP oscillators, which can produce multiple phase-locked oscillation patterns that correspond to the four basic quadrupedal gaits. Then the gait transitions between the different gaits are generated by altering the internal oscillator parameters. At last, we use VDP-CPG network to produce the joints trajectories for AIBO to control the locomotion. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the designed VDP-CPG network is effective to control the quadruped locomotion.