Control of a Trident Steering Walker - Design of Motion Parameters Based on a Propulsion Transfer Function

This paper introduces and describes a novel design methodology of the motion parameters for an undulatory locomotor: a trident steering walker based on a performance index: a propulsion transfer function. The undulatory locomotor transforms its periodic changes of shape into its movement, and it has a singular attitude in which it cannot perform such transformation. In order to prevent the locomotor from having the singular attitude, we propose to design the motion parameters based on the propulsion transfer function which is a metric of the attitude from the singular attitude. The propulsion transfer function is defined in kinematics although the motion of the locomotor should be evaluated in dynamics, so that we propose to measure the propulsion force of the locomotor in a dynamics simulator and to analyze the relationship between the propulsion transfer function defined in kinematics and the propulsion force measured in dynamics. We demonstrate that it is effective to design the motion parameters based on the propulsion transfer function.