Robust and adaptive locomotion of an autonomous hexapod

Abstract

This paper explores the viability of using cooperation among local controllers to achieve coherent global behavior. Our approach is to decompose a difficult control last for a complex robot into a multitude of simpler control tasks for robotic subsystems. We illustrate and examine the effectiveness of this approach via rough terrain locomotion using an autonomous hexapod robot. Traversing rough terrain is a good task to test the viability of this approach because it requires a considerable amount of leg coordination. We found that implementing a complicated global task with cooperating local controllers can effectively control complex robots.