Optimal path and gait generations simultaneously of a six-legged robot using a GA-fuzzy approach

A six-legged robot will have to find a collision-free, timeminimal path and to plan its stable gait in optimal sense (with minimum number of ground-legs having the maximum average kinematic margin) while moving on flat terrain. Three steps are to be considered for legged-robot locomotion determination of vehicle’s trajectory, foothold selection, and design of a sequence of leg movements. In practice, path and gait generations of a legged vehicle are to be done simultaneously. Several attempts had been made by various investigators to solve the problem of combined path and gait generation of a legged robot. In this connection, work of Lee and Song (1991), Chen and Kumar (1996) are worth mentioning.It is important to note that their methods were unable to provide a complete solution to this complicated task. Moreover, the conventional methods are computationally expensive and the generated path and gaits may not be optimal in any sense. Thus, there is still a need for the development of an efficient and computationally faster algorithm.