環境に呼応して足並みが柔軟に変化する多脚ロボットの脚間協調制御則

抄録

Centipedes can move adaptively in unstructured environments by coordinating a large number of legs. Clarifying the underlying control mechanism for walking will help not only contribute to biology but also develop highly adaptive multi-legged robots. We previously observed the centipedes’ response to the removal of a part of the terrain during walking and reported that the adaptive locomotion could be generated by a control mechanism using ground reaction forces detected at the legs. In this paper, we additionally observed the response to the appearance of a part of the terrain and found that centipedes utilized the newly obtained scaffold for propulsion. Based on this finding, we proposed an inter-limb coordination mechanism for multi-legged robots that enables adaptation to irregular terrain, and as a first step, we demonstrated via simulation that the proposed model could reproduce a steady gait pattern of centipedes.