PERFORMANCE-MEASURES FOR LOCOMOTION ROBOTS

We design two performance measures for a planar locomotion robot, mode led closely after the Platonic Beast. The first measure is proportiona l to the total motion of all joints during locomotion of the robot. Th is is a rough approximation to the energy consumption of the robot. Th e second measure determines the maximal speed of locomotion, for given limits on the joint speeds. We compute optimal modes of locomotion on different slopes for various designs. The results indicate that a var iable link length can greatly improve the ability of the robot to walk on steep slopes. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.