Development of a quadruped robot with redundant DOFs for high-degree of functionality and adaptation

Abstract

This paper presents a quadruped robot with redundant degrees of freedom (DOFs), which exploits its kinematic redundancy for various types of locomotion and manipulation. Unlike previously developed quadruped robots, the proposed robot can change its body posture and suitably adapt to different environments. For example, the robot can walk on a plain terrain, pass through a narrow gap, surmount an obstacle, perform a simple task by using one of its legs as a manipulator, etc. Inverse kinematics of each leg was solved by using a newly proposed method: Improved Jacobian Pseudoinverse (IJP) algorithm. Also, a static stability of the robot was dealt with using a combined Jacobian of a center of mass (COM) and centroid of a support polygon. Performance of the proposed robot was verified in both simulations and experiments.