Abstract
One of the issues for quadruped robot is to realize energy efficient dynamic locomotion with low calculation cost. This paper demonstrates the effect of the animal-like viscoelastic torso structure that facilitates dynamic locomotion with small calculation cost. We develop the torso mechanism that has multiple joints and tunable viscoelasticity, and we observe the effect of the energy efficient quadruped locomotion utilizing the proposed torso mechanism. Experimental results show that the locomotion with simple gait pattern can be obtained by tuning viscoelasticity. The results suggest that the proposed torso mechanism facilitares the dynamic locomotion even with the simple gait pattern that requires very small computation cost.
