Legged robots that balance
Evidence for Spring Loaded Inverted Pendulum Running in a Hexapod Robot
ISER '00 Experimental Robotics VII
Spring loaded inverted pendulum running: a plant model
Spring loaded inverted pendulum running: a plant model
The bow leg hopping robot
Control of a spring-mass hopper
Control of a spring-mass hopper
Dynamic locomotion with a hexapod robot
Dynamic locomotion with a hexapod robot
Modeling and Experiments of Untethered Quadrupedal Running with a Bounding Gait: The Scout II Robot
International Journal of Robotics Research
Proprioceptive sensing for a legged robot
Proprioceptive sensing for a legged robot
A parametric study on the rolling motion of dynamically running quadrupeds during pronking
MED '09 Proceedings of the 2009 17th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation
Asymptotically stable walking of a five-link underactuated 3-D bipedal robot
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
ICRA'09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international conference on Robotics and Automation
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Design, control, and energetics of an electrically actuated legged robot
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics
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Autonomous use of legged robots in unstructured, outdoor settings requires dynamically dexterous behaviors to achieve sufficient speed and agility without overly complex and fragile mechanics and actuation. Among such behaviors is the relatively under-studied pronking (aka. stotting), a dynamic gait in which all legs are used in synchrony, usually resulting in relatively slow speeds but long flight phases and large jumping heights. Instantiations of this gait for robotic systems have been mostly limited to open-loop strategies, suffering from severe pitch instability for underactuated designs due to the lack of active feedback. However, both the kinematic simplicity of this gait and its dynamic nature suggest that the Spring-Loaded Inverted Pendulum model (SLIP) would be a good basis for the implementation of a more robust feedback controller for pronking. In this paper, we describe how template-based control, a controller structure based on the embedding of a simple dynamical "template" within a more complex "anchor" system, can be used to achieve very stable pronking for a planar, underactuated hexapod robot. In this context, high-level control of the gait is regulated through speed and height commands to the SLIP template, while the embedding controller ensures the stability of the remaining degrees of freedom. We use simulation studies to show that unlike existing open-loop alternatives, the resulting control structure provides explicit gait control authority and significant robustness against sensor and actuator noise.