Masuda Yoichi, Naniwa Keisuke, Ishikawa Masato, Osuka Koichi
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Osaka University, Suita, Japan.
Research Institute for Electronic Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan.
Front Robot AI. 2021 Apr 29;8:629679. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2021.629679. eCollection 2021.
In this study, we discovered a phenomenon in which a quadruped robot without any sensors or microprocessor can autonomously generate the various gait patterns of animals using actuator characteristics and select the gaits according to the speed. The robot has one DC motor on each limb and a slider-crank mechanism connected to the motor shaft. Since each motor is directly connected to a power supply, the robot only moves its foot on an elliptical trajectory under a constant voltage. Although this robot does not have any computational equipment such as sensors or microprocessors, when we applied a voltage to the motor, each limb begins to adjust its gait autonomously and finally converged to a steady gait pattern. Furthermore, by raising the input voltage from the power supply, the gait changed from a pace to a half-bound, according to the speed, and also we observed various gait patterns, such as a bound or a rotary gallop. We investigated the convergence property of the gaits for several initial states and input voltages and have described detailed experimental results of each gait observed.
在本研究中，我们发现了一种现象：一个没有任何传感器或微处理器的四足机器人能够利用执行器特性自主生成动物的各种步态模式，并根据速度选择步态。该机器人每条腿上有一个直流电机，还有一个连接到电机轴的曲柄滑块机构。由于每个电机都直接连接到电源，机器人在恒定电压下仅使脚在椭圆形轨迹上移动。尽管这个机器人没有任何诸如传感器或微处理器之类的计算设备，但当我们给电机施加电压时，每个肢体开始自主调整其步态，最终收敛到一种稳定的步态模式。此外，通过提高电源的输入电压，步态会根据速度从慢步变为半步，并且我们还观察到了各种步态模式，如跳跃或旋转疾驰。我们研究了几种初始状态和输入电压下步态的收敛特性，并描述了观察到的每种步态的详细实验结果。
