Cheap rapid locomotion of a quadruped robot: Self-stabilization of bounding gait

Abstract. The legged animals are capable of rapid, energy efficient, and adaptive lo-comotion in a complex environment. Toward a comprehensive understanding of the nature of such ecologically balanced legged locomotion, in this paper, we propose a novel method to achieve a form of bounding gait for a quadruped robot by using a minimalistic approach. Although this method uses a simple sinusoidal position con-trol with no global sensory feedback, it is shown that the rapid bounding is possible in a relatively robust manner by properly exploiting the intrinsic dynamics and the interaction with the environment. The behavioral analyses with the robot experiments show that this relatively complicated dynamic locomotion is achieved even with a simple controller mainly because of a self-stabilization mechanism. Moreover, by ex-ploiting this mechanism of self-stabilization, we propose a unique approach to control the forward velocity of the locomotion.