Six-Legged Robots Faster Than Nature-Inspired Gait

for a long time roboticists have been
inspired by nature in designing their robots
for example when looking at how to
construct six legged robots they're
inspired by insects. In insects if you look
across many different species use the
same locomotor strategy for moving
fastest: they use the tripod gait. it's a movement in
synchrony of the front and rear legs on
one side of the animal with the middle
leg on the other when you don't have
adhesion which insects use to crawl up
walls or on ceilings or other three
dimensional surfaces you actually can
move more quickly using what we call a
bipod gait. A bipod gait is a
dynamically stable gait that allows the
robot to use two legs on the ground at
once instead of three to move more
quickly through the environment. To test
this actually was the best strategy for
six-legged motion we developed a
insect model in simulation and actually
essentially re-evolved locomotor
strategies for this model. We took this
hexapode robot, and we tried the
tripod gait and the bipod gait, and what
we saw is that the bipod gait was always faster
and this confirmed our results from
simulation. But insects don't use the
bipod gait so why might this be?
We saw in simulation that adhesion
might be the reason why the tripod gait
is there, so we asked ourselves what
happens if we block adhesion in the real
insect. So we put little polymer boots which
block the adhesion and saw that the
tripod gait was disappearing and what we
saw actually is more of a bipod like
pattern
so these results show how we can control
robots to move more quickly and
efficiently on the ground and also
informed biologist for why it is that
insects move the way they do through the world

Six-Legged Robots Faster Than Nature-Inspired Gait

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