Omnidirectional walking of legged robots with a failed leg

This paper studies omnidirectional walking of a hexapod robot with a locked joint failure by proposing crab gaits and turning gaits. Due to the reduced workspace of a failed leg, fault-tolerant gaits have limitations in their mobility. As for crab gaits, an accessible range of the crab angle is derived for a given configuration of the failed leg. As for turning gaits, the conditions on turning trajectories guaranteeing fault tolerance are derived for spinning gaits and circling gaits. Based on the principles of fault-tolerant gait planning, periodic crab gaits and turning gaits are proposed in which a hexapod robot realizes tripod walking after a locked joint failure, having a reasonable stride length and stability margin. The proposed fault-tolerant gaits are then applied to an obstacle avoidance problem of a hexapod robot with a locked joint failure. The kinematic constraints of fault-tolerant gaits should be considered in planning the robot trajectory. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.