Decentralized control mechanism for limb steering in quadruped robot walking

摘要

Quadrupedal mammals adaptively change their direction, and their behavior is remarkable when they initiate such turns. They flexibly alter their interlimb coordination patterns when transitioning from forward to turning motion. However, the turning performance of quadruped robots is low compared to that of animals. We attempted to understand the control mechanism underlying the animal's flexible turning behavior by developing a simple robot model. We hypothesize that animals achieve lateral acceleration during transitions by adjusting the position of their limbs sideways at ground contact. On this basis, we proposed a decentralized control model for limb steering in quadrupedal turning behavior. The results obtained from the robot simulation demonstrated that either a turn initiated by the medial forelimb or the lateral forelimb occurred depending on the timing of the turn command. The fact that the proposed control algorithm could reproduce the behavior observed in animals suggests that a mechanism similar to the algorithm may exist in animals. Biological verification is expected in the future.