Passive Walking with Leg Compliance for Energy Efficient Multilegged Vehicles

In this paper we address the problem of finding an energy efficient locomotion scheme for multilegged walking vehicles. Our approach makes use of compliant actuators to store and release the kinetic and potential energy of the body and legs during each gait cycle.An evolutionary strategy algorithm is used to search the initial condition parameter space until a nearly passive cyclic gait is found. The trajectory of this gait can then be used in a specific class of hexapods to significantly reduce the energy used over each gait cycle.