Enhancing Stability of Fault-Tolerant Gaits of a Quadruped Robot Using Moving Appendage

摘要

For multi-legged robots with static walking, fault-tolerant gaits realize robust walking with degraded performance that tolerates adverse effects of a leg failure. This paper presents a scheme of fault-tolerant gaits for a quadruped robot with a moving appendage. As a redundant hardware placed onto the robot body, the moving appendage serves as a controllable apparatus that changes the position of the center of gravity of the gait. By adjusting the moving appendage, the quadruped robot can enhance the stability of the fault-tolerant gait and eliminate the drawback of the former gait that it has marginal gait stability. We analyze in detail the relation between the dynamics of the moving appendage and the performance of the fault-tolerant gait.