| Title |
Fault-Tolerant Tripod Gaits Considering Deadlock Avoidance |
| Keywords |
Hexapod Robots ; Fault Tolerance ; Deadlock Avoidance ; Locked Joint Failure ; Tripod Gaits |
| Abstract |
Fault-tolerant gait planning in legged locomotion is to design gaits with which legged robots can maintain static stability and motion continuity against a failure in a leg. For planning a robust and deadlock-free fault-tolerant gait, kinematic constraints caused by a failed leg should be closely examined with respect to remaining mobility of the leg. In this paper, based on the authors's previous results, deadlock avoidance scheme for fault-tolerant gait planning is proposed for a hexapod robot walking over even terrain. The considered fault is a locked joint failure, which prevents a joint of a leg from moving and makes it locked in a known position. It is shown that for guaranteeing the existence of the previously proposed fault-tolerant tripod gait of a hexapod robot, the configuration of the failed leg must be within a range of kinematic constraints. Then, for coping with failure situations where the existence condition is not satisfied, the previous fault-tolerant tripod gait is improved by including the adjustment of the foot trajectory. The foot trajectory adjustment procedure is analytically derived to show that it can help the fault-tolerant gait avoid deadlock resulting from the kinematic constraint and does not make any harmful effect on gait mobility. The post-failure walking problem of a hexapod robot with the normal tripod gait is addressed as a case study to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. |