Translational Crawl and Path Tracking of a Quadruped Robot

Abstract

Abstract Translational crawl and path tracking are presented for a quadruped robot, named TITAN‐VIII, to walk on rough ground. The generalized and explicit formulation is derived to generate the translational crawl gait in an arbitrary direction automatically, to control the joint positions, and to estimate the robot localization in a walking environment. Compared to conventional gaits, the proposed gait is characterized by a natural and continuous transition between any successive gait cycles, by a maximized stride of the robot in each gait cycle, and by different foot trajectories corresponding to the uneven terrain. Especially, the proposed approach enables the quadruped robot to track a reference path in a complex walking environment, based on dead‐reckoning localization for the robot. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through the experimental results. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.