Prismatic Omni-directional legged machine for rough environmet movement by a simple mechanical drive

A legged robot is one of the ideal mechanisms for moving around muddy, irregular, and fragile surfaces. However, a legged robot will easily be unable to move if its body is turned over. Some robots have special mechanisms for recovery. But having extra mechanisms may increase possibilities of malfunction. Our approach is to make a robot that has legs around its body so that it never turns over. Also our idea is to drive these legs synchronously by a set of gears and links so that it performs the same gait to the same moving direction. We found that this is possible for any prismatic bodies that have side surfaces of a multiple of four. In this paper we demonstrate this by some examples of four side surfaces configurations.