Decentralized Autonomous Control of a Myriapod Locomotion Robot

Applications such as demining and planetary exploration require locomotion over unstructured terrain. A suitable approach to solve this problem is to use legged robots, because of the flexibility that they can offer, together with a compact size. Deciding on the gait patterns of the robot that optimizes such criteria as energy consumption, walking speed and providing a good stability margin against falling over, are important problems that need to be solved. A myriapod robot is advantageous because the large number of legs contributes to the margin of stability and provides robustness against the failure of each individual leg. However, the choice of a suitable gait pattern becomes a more difficult task since more combinations of patterns arise. In this paper, we introduce a myriapod robot with ten legs, which was built with the purpose of investigating algorithms for generating gait patterns. The gait pattern generator contains nonlinear oscillators. Various gait patterns emerge through the mutual entrainment of these oscillators. The work presented here is preliminary and contains a small amount of experimental data. This paper is intended to give information about research that is planned on the subject.