Leg-grope-walk — Walking strategy on weak and irregular slopes for a quadruped robot by force distribution

When a legged-robot walks on an irregular terrain such as a damaged area, some footholds may collapse due to the external force caused by the walking robot, and consequently the robot will stumble and fall. We have earlier proposed a locomotion method in which the quadruped robot does not stumble and cause a large collapse of the surrounding area on a weak horizontal plane. In this paper, we extend this method to weak and irregular slopes. In the case of slopes, we should consider “slippage”. We propose a force distribution method for the leg-grope that also considers slippage. To demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method, we will show an experimental result.