Generating walking behaviours in legged robots

• Main Author: Reeve, Richard
• Published: University of Edinburgh 1999
• Subjects: 003.5
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.661002

Many legged robots have been built with a variety of different abilities, from running to hopping to climbing stairs. Despite this however, there has been no consistency of approach to the problem of getting them to walk. Approaches have included breaking down the walking step into discrete parts and then controlling them separately, using springs and linkages to achieve a passive walking cycle, and even working out the necessary movements in simulation and then imposing them on the real robot. All of these have limitations, although most were successful at the task for which they were designed. However, all of them fall into one of two categories: either they alter the dynamics of the robots physically so that the robot, whilst very good at walking, is not as general purpose as it once was (as with the passive robots), or they control the physical mechanism of the robot directly to achieve their goals, and this is a difficult task. In this thesis a novel control model is proposed, inspired by the best walkers and runners around - ourselves - so the controllers produced are based on the vertebrate Central Nervous System. This means that there is a low-level controller which adapts itself to the robot so that, when switched on, it effectively simulates the springs and linkages of the passive robots to produce a walking robot, and this now active mechanism is then controlled by a relatively simple higher level controller. This is the beast of both worlds - we have a robot which is inherently capable of walking, and thus is easy to control like the passive walkers, but also retains the general purpose abilities which makes it so potentially useful.