High-rate controlled turning with a pair of miniature legged robots

Legged robots can explore unstructured environments more effectively than wheeled robots, but high turning rate tracking is still a challenging problem, particularly on varying surfaces. Previous steering methods with small robots have shown high turn rates, but usually only on a limited set of surfaces. This paper proposes a new method for steering a miniaturized legged robot by cooperation between two robots connected by a compliant joint, creating a 73 gram, 12 legged robot. Detailed design issues and an empirical verification are presented for several cooperation strategies, including changing velocities of the 4 sets of leg triples. The robots use their combined traction forces to turn at better than 50 degrees/sec at 1 m/sec on various surfaces. Closed-loop steering using a differential drive strategy is implemented on the connected robots to track a “figure 8” trajectory on a tile surface.

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