| Abstract: | A free gait is a computer generated, rule-based gait for a walking machine to walk on rough terrain. Based on a given terrain map, the gait algorithm selects footholds for leg placements and determines the movements of legs and body. In the past, a few free gaits for hexapods have been developed. For quadrupeds, the only report on free gait was briefly mentioned in a paper by Hirose Int. J. Robotics Res., 3(2) (1984)]. In this paper, a free gait algorithm for a quadrupedal walking chair is developed. For quadrupeds, the stability margin is small due to a small number of legs and the choices of a leg to be lifted are limited. Hence, deadlock situations may occur quite often. Many special techniques are incorporated into the algorithm in order to reduce deadlocks. This free gait algorithm adopts the wave-crab gaits as the primary gait because they are periodic and can provide good stability. The algorithm also adopts a non-periodic free gait to handle terrain with higher concentration of forbidden areas. This algorithm is evaluated under different terrain conditions using computer simulations. The results show that the performance is satisfactory on randomly generated rough terrain and needs improvement on manually generated rough terrain. |
