This paper presents a novel gait control scheme for teleoperation of a quadruped walking robot. In many conventional gait control schemes, the leg motion of a walking robot has been generated from a planned moving trajectory of the robot. However, as an operator is to give a velocity command to a walking robot in real-time without a planned moving trajectory, its leg trajectory should be generated in real-time corresponding to the velocity command of the operator. The periodic gait is well known to be the optimal one but this requires an initial foot position which is different relative to a moving direction. The purpose of this paper is to propose the gait algorithm that can not only converge to a wave-crab gait or wave-spinning gait but also avoid deadlocks after the directional change by velocity command.
The proposed gait algorithm is applied to Centaur which is a quadruped walking robot invented by KIST. Because Centaur has heavy legs and very large moving region of gravity center, sway motion scheme is incorporated in the algorithm. For evaluating of the proposed algorithm, the simulations and experiments are carried out successfully.
