Quadrupedal Locomotion

Walking machines have potential advantages over traditional vehicles, and they have already succeeded in carrying out many tasks that wheeled or tracked robots cannot handle. Quadrupedal Locomotion: An Introduction to Four-legged Robots brings together some of the methods and techniques in this emerging field that have recently been developed in to deal with the problems that currently prevent legged robots being more widely used for real applications. As the first book to focus specifically on quadrupeds, Quadrupedal Locomotion: An Introduction to the Control of Four-legged Robots will be bought by researchers, postgraduates and senior undergraduates in the field of robotics as well as engineers working in industry.

First book to focus specifically on quadrupeds Illustrates algorithms and methods by discussing simulation and experiments that have been tested on a real machine, the SILO4 walking robot Data from these experiments can be found on-line

Autorentext

The authors work at the Department of Automatic Control of the Industrial Automation Institute (IAI), which belongs to the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). Over the past ten years, they have been involved in the research of walking robots techniques and have participated in the design and manufacturing of up to six different legged robots (climbing and walking) for diverse applications including ship building, terrain consolidation in civil-engineering works, educational robots and humanitarian demining.

One of those robots (SILO4) is the basic model for simulation (geometric model) and experiments (real model) and there exist three replicas of this design which are owned by IAI-CSIC (Spain), University of Bourges (France) and University of Murcia (Spain). This robot is used for education and basic research purposes at these universities. The design drawings and some manufacturing hints are provided on the internet for those researchers willing to manufacture their own replicas.

The basic material of this book is the result of four Ph.D. theses and three M.Sc. theses developed and/or advised by this book's authors, who have also some international experience: Dr. Gonzalez de Santos worked at the Robotics Institute (Carnegie-Mellon University) as a visiting scientist where he was involved in the development of the AMBLER walking robot; Dr. Garcia worked at the Leg Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a visiting scholar where she was involved in the study of dynamic aspects of legged robots and Dr. Estremera is currently working at the University of Stanford (CA) with Professor Waldron, one of the most prominent researchers in legged locomotion.

Inhalt
Walking Measurements and Algorithms.- Walking Robots.- Stability in Walking Robots.- Generation of Periodic Gaits.- Generation of Non-periodic Gaits.- New Approaches to Stability.- Control Techniques.- Kinematics and Dynamics.- Improving Leg Speed by Soft Computing Techniques.- Virtual Sensors for Walking Robots.- Human-machine Interfaces.- The SILO4 Walking Robot.- Simulation Software for Walking Robots.