Locomotion control of a multi-legged locomotion robot using oscillators

Abstract

This paper proposes the locomotion control system for a multi-legged locomotion robot. The proposed control system is composed of leg motion controllers and a gait pattern controller. The leg motion controllers drive the actuators of the legs by using local feedback control. The gait pattern controller is composed of nonlinear oscillators. The oscillators tune the phases through the mutual interactions and the feedback signals from the touch sensors at the tips of the legs. Various gait patterns emerge through the mutual entrainment of these oscillators. As a result, the robot with the controller walks stably by changing its gait patterns in a wide range of locomotion speed. Moreover, it continues to walk even if a part of leg controller breaks down. The performance of the proposed control system is verified by numerical simulations.