On the Determinant of Spontaneous Gait Transition in Legged Locomotion

摘要

Quadrupeds exhibit versatile gait patterns depending on locomotion speed, morphology, and environments. To understand essential control mechanisms underlying quadruped locomotion, various models of coordination between limbs (i.e., interlimb coordination) have been proposed. Some previous studies have demonstrated that robots exhibit speed dependent gait transition with local sensory feedback mechanism despite no neural communication between limbs. Although exploiting embodied systems is a key to establish a control principle for the legged robot that can generate flexible locomotor patterns without high computational cost, interactions among the mechanical system, control system, and environment are too complicated. This study investigates the spontaneous gait transition mechanism via a simple decentralized control scheme in the embodied system. To this purpose, we employ a simpler system than quadruped robots, i.e., a bipedal hopping robot. The simulation results show that physical interactions along the anti-gravitational direction is essential to generate self-organized gait transition in response to locomotor frequency.