Walking Gaits

Walking gaits are the study of legged motion and how legs can be used to produce different kinds of motion. We're interested in learning how to control these legs, and also we want to extract general principles of legged motion, so we can easily port these to novel robot designs.

There are the typical bipeds which is what humans are, two-legged creatures. And there are the quadruped and hexapod creatures that have 4 and 6 legs respectively.

We often look to biological organisms and what their solutions are for legged motion. You can look at Kimura for examples of taking biological concepts and porting them to robots. I'm studying quadrupeds right now, so most of his papers are on quadrupeds, but I beliieve he does more general research.

Basically, they use neural oscillators to generate the movements of the joints. All of the oscillators for each joint are coupled, or "mutually entrained" as he says. I believe this also means that they're conditioned to respond to each other effectively just like you would train any neural network. This also makes the robot control adaptive since the oscillators are sensitive to the joint angles.

Of course, the problem with this is that you need to be doing numerical operations in real-time and also communicate the entrainment between all the joints in real-time. This is easy to do if you build a custom robot for this application, but on a generic robot platform, communication and computation becomes an issue.