A Static Gait Generation for Quadruped Robots with Optimized Walking Speed

Traversing at a high speed while maintaining stability is important for the application of quadruped robots. Prior works mainly concentrated on optimizing the stability margin of quadruped robots when walking through a variety of terrains. However, the problem of improving quadruped robots’ walking velocity with static gait is less concerned in their works. In this paper, the static gait planning problem is considered under the assumption that a set of irregular footholds on the rough terrain is given, and two approaches are proposed to improve the walking speed. The first one is a distance optimization algorithm, which can minimize the moving distance of the center of gravity (COG) in the stance phases based on the stability and the kinematic constraint. The other is a velocity optimization algorithm, which enables the body and the feet to move at the highest velocity with the joint angular velocity limit. The joint application of these two optimization algorithms significantly improves the walking speed of the quadruped robot. Simulation results in V-REP are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches in improving the walking speed. Compared with the traditional gait planning techniques, one that moves the robot with the optimal stability margin, and the other that moves the robot without optimizing the velocity, our algorithms increase the average walking velocity by 81.6% and 32.8%, respectively.