A gait-transition method for a quadruped walking robot

legged robots are expected as the attractive tool to transport in various environment such as rough terrain, nuclear reactors, etc. The stability of their motion is one of most important problem and, especially, the gait change should be well considered not to lose the stability. In this paper, we propose a successive gait-transition method with stability secured for a quadruped walking robot. The gait-transitions from a standard gait such as a crawl gait and a rotation gait are investigated to realize the static stable walk. The X-crawl, Y-crawl, O-rotation and their reverse gait are the standard gaits. In the proposed method, the common foot positions, those are the same leg arrangements among standard gaits, are utilized for stable and smooth gait transition. The experimental results show that proposed gait transition is efficient and realized in a short time without that the robot is in the unstable conditions.