Experimental study on energy efficiency for quadruped walking vehicles

Though a legged robot has high terrain adaptability as compared with a wheeled vehicle, its moving speed is considerably low in general. For attaining a high moving speed with a legged robot, a dynamically stable gait, such as running for a biped robot and a trot gait or a bound gait for a quadruped robot, is a promising solution. However, the energy efficiency of the dynamically stable gait is generally lower than the efficiency of the stable gait such as a crawl gait. In this paper, we present an experimental study on the energy efficiency of a quadruped walking vehicle. Energy consumption of two walking patterns for a trot gait is investigated through experiments using a quadruped walking vehicle named TITAN-VIII. The obtained results show that the 3D sway compensation trajectory proposed in our previous paper [R. Kurazume et al., 2002] has advantages in view of energy efficiency as compared with the original sway compensation trajectory.