A Biologically-Inspired Dynamic Legged Locomotion With a Modular Reconfigurable Robot

Reconfigurable Modular robots can adapt their morphology and their gaits for locomotion to different types of environment, whether like a snake for constrained spaces or a wheeled like shape for efficient and fast locomotion on flat terrain. This paper proposes a scalable biologically-inspired legged style of locomotion. It proposes a modular robot with legs that are compliant. The legs are purely passive with no actuators and locomotion is achieved using pure body articulation. Results are shown of a dynamical bouncing gait utilizing this hexapod configuration with a Spring Loaded Inverted Pendulum (SLIP) template for a dynamical model. The model and control is such that it is easily scalable to any number of legs, however this work presents a 6 legged implementation.

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