Three-legged walking for fault tolerant locomotion of a quadruped robot with demining mission

In the demining application area of a multi-legged robot, it is one of the important problems to develop a gait with one or more legs missing. This paper presents a three-legged gait under the assumption that one leg of a quadruped walking robot is missing. We propose a classification scheme of postures for three-legged walking. As one of the basic and reasonable gaits for three-legged walking, the kick-and-swing gait is proposed and analyzed using a simple dynamic model. The minimum energy gait planning and an active shock-absorbing method are investigated. The validity of the proposed gait is shown by experiments using a quadruped walking robot TITAN VIII.