FCP Gait Control for Hexapod Robot Capable of Decreasing/Increasing Number of Walking Legs

This paper proposes a novel walk control for hexapod robots based on Follow-the-Contact-Point (FCP) gait control, which can reduce or increase the number of walking legs during walking. The FCP gait control is decentralized event-driven gait control for multi-legged robots. In order to adapt the FCP gait control to changing the number of walking legs, we first introduce locomotion flag for each leg and adjacent information between legs. Then, to implement the adjacent information, the transition conditions of the control algorithm of FCP gait control are improved. As a result, the control algorithm obtains the properties of deadlock-free and maintaining the support triangle. The effectiveness of the proposed control architecture is verified by experiments in which a hexapod robot changes the number of walking legs during walking and walks on rough terrain even when the number of walking legs is reduced.