A General Locomotion Approach for a Novel Multi-legged Spherical Robot

As a kind of ground mobile robot, deformable robots have many advantages, such as solid terrain adaptability, lightweight, and portability. Among these robots, the radial skeleton robot has better stability and controllability. However, because the friction of foot and ground is hard to be predicted, the accuracy of its gait generation algorithms that have been studied is very low. Furthermore, there is currently no closed-loop control scheme for this kind of robot. We designed a 12-legged radial skeleton robot with high extension ratio legs, proposed a high-precision gait generation algorithm for any multi-legged radial skeleton robot, and first proposed a closed-loop control scheme for this kind of robot. A dynamic model considering contact friction is established. And the robot has the advantages of omnidirectional motion, high-precision trajectory tracking, and motion robustness. By conducting prototype experiments, it is verified that our method achieves the highest accuracy when tracking trajectory and holds robustness in the unknown environment.