Emergence of walk and bound gaits on a quadruped robot reproducing hip-knee reflexes of cats

Abstract

Animals change their behavior in various environments. For example, quadruped animals exhibit various gait depending on speed. In this study, we considered the mechanism of gait generation from the viewpoint of reflexes. We constructed a control law that reproduces reflexes based on the results of previous experiments on decerebrated cats. A quadruped robot that we developed exhibited a walking gait and a bounding gait with the control law. The contribution of this study is showing that the quadruped robot changes the gait patterns only by changing the speed of hip extension. This result suggests that animals may change their gaits depending on the speed of hip extension.