Development of multi-legged locomotion for fast walking

The paper describes the development of the walking robot with 6 legs actuated with electrical motors. The main subject in this paper is to achieve fast walking on the robot which is available to carry a human, and then the issues are to resolve the technical tradeoff between the power for its own heavy load and the walking speed for locomotion. The structures and gait designs of the robot are detailed, and its performance in the physical experiments has been reported. In our proposed approach, the gait is designed based on the tripod with considering the restrictions of the motor current for low electricity consumption, and then, consequently, the locomotive velocity has achieved 0.45[m/s] per a step cycle 2.11[s] of a leg. And also, a trial way for detecting a collision between a sole of the robot and an obstacle fixed on the ground is studied through the experiments in the force sensorless approach. The validity of the collision detection in our proposed method has been confirmed in the examinations to estimate the obstacle position.