RHex: A Biologically Inspired Hexapod Runner

By R. Altendorfer, N. Moore, H. Komsuoglu, Martin Buehler, H. B. Brown, D. McMordie, U. Saranlı, Robert J. Full, Daniel E. Koditschek. Auton. Robots, 2001

441 citations recorded by the source corpus.

RHex is an untethered, compliant leg hexapod robot that travels at better than one body length per second over terrain few other robots can negotiate at all. Inspired by biomechanics insights into arthropod locomotion, RHex uses a clock excited alternating tripod gait to walk and run in a highly maneuverable and robust manner. We present empirical data establishing that RHex exhibits a dynamical (“bouncing”) gait—its mass center moves in a manner well approximated by trajectories from a Spring Loaded Inverted Pendulum (SLIP)—characteristic of a large and diverse group of running animals, when its central clock, body mass, and leg stiffnesses are appropriately tuned. The SLIP template can function as a useful control guide in developing more complex autonomous locomotion behaviors such as registration via visual servoing, local exploration via visual odometry, obstacle avoidance, and, eventually, global mapping and localization.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7cb96a7036324b883520b842003bcd689df1c1b9

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Citations in the corpus

Central pattern generators for locomotion control in animals and robots: A review (2008, background): “Other projects that are not directly related to CPGs but also use robots to test hypotheses about animal locomotion include (Altendorfer et al., 2001; Long, Schumacher, Livingston, & Kemp, 2006; Ritzmann et al., 2004).”
Waalbot: An Agile Small-Scale Wall-Climbing Robot Utilizing Dry Elastomer Adhesives (2007, methodology): “Unlike many previous implementations of wheel-leg designs such as the ground walking RHex [11], Whegs [12], and miniWhegs [13] robots, Waalbot’s legs are specialized for climbing.”
The hydrodynamics of water-walking arthropods (2010, background): “Locomotion by water walkers such as Microvelia, Mesovelia and Hydrometra is characterized by an alternating tripod gait analogous to that employed on land by cockroaches and other terrestrial hexapods (Altendorfer et al. 2001).”
Biologically inspired climbing with a hexapedal robot (2008, methodology): “RiSE uses an open-loop gait, a strategy commonly used with dynamic quadrupedal and hexapedal robots (Altendorfer et al., 2001; Cham, Bailey, Clark, Full, & Cutkosky, 2002; Poulakakis, Smith, & Buehler, 2005), to achieve these ground reaction forces.”
Manuscript: Stable Running with Segmented Legs ¤ (2008, positive): “Based on articulated compliant legs, the fundamental characteristics of the SLIP template could be inherited (Altendorfer et al., 2001).”
Towards dynamic trot gait locomotion: Design, control, and experiments with Cheetah-cub, a compliant quadruped robot (2013, methodology): “Keywords self-stabilizing quadruped locomotion, three-segment, pantograph, robotic leg design, passive compliance, robust locomotion, coupled oscillator, drive function”
Zebedee: Design of a Spring-Mounted 3-D Range Sensor with Application to Mobile Mapping (2012, background): “Useful accelerations, vibrations, and oscillations are naturally present in small rotary wing UAVs, off-road wheeled vehicles, and allterrain legged robots, such as RHex [11] and LittleDog [12].”