The Effect of Morphology on the Spinal Engine Driven Locomotion in a Quadruped Robot

The biological hypothesis of spinal engine states that the locomotion is mainly achieved by the spine, while legs only serve as assistance. Inspired by this spinal engine hypothesis, a compliant, multi-DOF, biologically inspired spine has been developed and embedded into a quadruped robot without actuation on legs. The experimental results support this spinal engine hypothesis and reveal that this kind of robot can achieve rapid, stable, and even dynamical locomotion by appropriately tuning the spine’s morphological parameters, e.g., rearranging the silicone blocks.