Adaptive gait planning for multi-legged robots with an adjustment of center-of-gravity

Adaptive gait planning is an important aspect in the development of control systems for multi-legged robots traversing on rough terrain. The problem o f adaptive gait generation can be viewed as one of finding a sequence of su itable foothold on rough terrain so that legged systems maintain static sta bility and motion continuity. Due to the limit of static stability, deadloc k situation may occur in the process of searching for a suitable foothold, if terrain contains a large number of forbidden zones. In this paper, an im proved method for adaptive gait planning is presented by active compensatio n of stability margin, through center of gravity (CG) adjustment in the lon gitudinal axis and/or body translation in the lateral direction. An algorit hm for the proposed method is developed and embedded in a computer program. Simulation results show that the method provides legged machines with a mu ch larger terrain adaptivity and better deadlock-avoidance ability.