Gait analysis for six-legged robots

We present a general method for the analysis of the gaits used by a six-legged robot independently of the mechanism used to generate the gait. The gait state of the robot is de ned as a function of the last executed steps and several classes of gait states as well as the transitions between them are identi ed. As an example, we apply our method to the well-know wave gaits (the most e cient and stable gaits for straight line locomotion on at terrain) showing interesting properties about how they can be generated, the relation between all the possible wave gaits and about the emergence of the tripod gait under certain assumptions likely to hold when walking on at terrain.