Analysis of a Simple Mechanism for Building Multilegged Robotic Systems

We propose a one-degree-of-freedom mechanism based on a modified Hoe ken's linkage, to build multilegged robots, where each leg can be controlled independently. We present the design equations of the linkage to determine the size of the elements from the length of a desired stride. We show an application example to obtain a linkage whose stride has the average length of a human adult step. The mechanism is easy-to-build, to control and to synchronize, since it is a crank-rocker linkage with only revolute joints. It allows the generation of several step patterns.