Development of a compliant legged quadruped robot

This paper presents the detailed steps for design and development of a compliant legged fault tolerant quadruped robot where each leg has two links and two motorized revolute joints for locomotion. The body and upper links of legs are rigid whereas the lower link of each leg is compliant. Amble gait is demonstrated on the developed robot. Safety and reliability are the most critical issues for the quadruped robot. During the failure of any joint, performance of quadruped robot is affected. In this paper, locked joint failure is also discussed. Strategies for fault tolerant control of the quadruped are developed and experimentally validated. The developed robot can be used for various hardware-in-the-loop controller prototyping such as reconfiguration, fault tolerant control, and posture control, etc. pertaining to quadruped robots.