Effect of Neck Movement on Walk Speed of Horse Shaped Quadruped Robot

Abstract

Real horses swing their heads while walking. We consider that the neck swing motion can be utilized for increasing the walking speed or stabilization when walking. In this report, we designed and fabricated a head and neck joint for our quadruped robot to investigate the effect of the neck swing motion on walking. We utilized Chebyshev linkage as a neck joint mechanism. We slightly changed the link length ratio from the Chebyshev linkage. We conducted a waking experiment to investigate the effect of neck swing motion on the robot’s walking speed. From the experimental result, we found that the average walking speed of the robot with the head is larger than the robot with without it.