Energy analysis of Multi-legged Locomotion Systems

4th International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots - From Biology to Industrial Applications

This paper presents the energy analysis of periodic gaits for multi-legged locomotion systems. The main purpose is to determine the system performance during walking and the best set of locomotion variables that minimizes a cost function related to energy. For that objective, the prescribed motion of the robot is completely characterized in terms of several locomotion variables such as gait, duty factor, body height, step lengh, stroke pitch, maximum foot clearance, link lengths, body and legs mass and cycle time. In this work, we formulate three indices to quanitatively measure the performance of the walking robot namely the mean absolute power, the mean power dispersion and the mean power lost in the joint actuators. A set of experiments reveals the influence of the locomotion variables in the proposed indices.