A Four-legged Robot's Soft Feet Structural Design and Walking Gait Generated from Inverse Kinematics

Abstract

The conventional wheel is famous in the industrial mobile robot because it is simple to build and easy to control and to maneuver. On the other hand, the legged robot is complicated to control but has a high performance in locomotion like highly evolved legged-creatures. This research describes the four-legged robot design platform with the soft feet, which are made by siliconematerial forming. The robot’s feet are implanted by the strain gauge sensor. The robot can percept the external force sensitively when its feet touch something. The research demonstrates the forward kinematics and inverse kinematics of a four-legged robot with three joints for each. The result has validated the kinematic equations by implementing them on the real dog-like pet robot. The robot walked with a pure walking gait and showed a sensing signal from the soft foot and ground contact.