Local control mechanisms in six-legged walking

Walknet, a biological inspired neural network, has been proposed to control walking of a 6-legged; 18 DoF walker. Control of stance movement is difficult because all legs in stance are mechanically coupled. Based on the idea of velocity feedback, recently a specific revision, local positive velocity feedback, has been proposed to solve this problem using an extremely decentralised architecture. In this control scheme the locally measured joint velocity of an elastic joint is fed into the same joint in the next time step to maintain the movement. At the same time an additional part of the same joint controller observes the mechanical joint power to confine the positive feedback. In this paper, we show that this principle can actually be successfully applied to move a complete 6-legged system. This is tested using a dynamic simulation.