Gait Planning And Balance Recovery Strategy For Legged Robot

Research on legged robots is currently one of the most exciting topics inthe field of robotics because of the flexibility in the movement of leggedrobots. When mentioned flexibility, it is beyond doubt that the most commonseen animals: dog and cat are known for their flexible motion,and don’tforget human race, as they all belong to legged animals, we put legged robotsas our research object. The greatest advantage of legged robots comparedwith wheeled robots lie in there mobility when moving in uneven ground, forlegged robots, they simply need several foothold to put down their feet. Iwould like to say this is the main reason that results to the flexibility of theirmovement. However, that also leads to the instability of the motion becauseof too small contact area with the ground of the foot which results in highcenter of gravity. Let alone when an external force exerted on quadrupedrobots, which is common for legged robots be applied in real environment,e.g. the robot may crash into something during its walking or simply bedisturbed by human beings. So finally we choose gait planning of legged robot including biped robot and quadruped robot as our first researchemphasis. And we even build a biped robot of our own, so as to better testingthe gait planning.In addition to that, we propose a method of maintaining balance for aquadruped robot while suffering from comparatively large lateral disturbance.The method is composed of attitude adjustment and stepping strategy. Theattitude adjustment is used to maintaining balance for the robot by adjustingthe walking parameters like the step length and height based on the statusinformation of the robot when the lateral force is relatively small, and whenthe perturbation is large enough, simply adjusting the walking parameters isineffective for the balance recovery as the robot already tilt laterally severely,it is common sense to let the robot take a few lateral steps to ease the impacton the robot, we obtain each lateral step length through stepping strategyaccording to the lateral velocity of the quadruped robot. Finally, in thesimulation we exert a lateral force on our own quadruped robot, of which theperformance well proved our method.