Brainless Walking: Animal Gaits Emerge From an Actuator Characteristic.

In this study, we discovered a phenomenon in which a quadruped robot without any sensors or microprocessor can autonomously generate the various gait patterns of animals using actuator characteristics and select the gaits according to the speed. The robot has one DC motor on each limb and a slider-crank mechanism connected to the motor shaft. Since each motor is directly connected to a power supply, the robot only moves its foot on an elliptical trajectory under a constant voltage. Although this robot does not have any computational equipment such as sensors or microprocessors, when we applied a voltage to the motor, each limb begins to adjust its gait autonomously and finally converged to a steady gait pattern. Furthermore, by raising the input voltage from the power supply, the gait changed from a pace to a half-bound, according to the speed, and also we observed various gait patterns, such as a bound or a rotary gallop. We investigated the convergence property of the gaits for several initial states and input voltages and have described detailed experimental results of each gait observed.

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Copyright © 2021 Masuda, Naniwa, Ishikawa and Osuka.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The handling editor declared a past co-authorship with one of the authors KO.