Fault Tolerant Gaits for a Six-Legged Robot With One Locked or Uncontrollable Failure

Multi-legged robots need fault tolerant gaits if one or more legs are broken down and cannot have maintenance when in long-distance operations or hash environments. There are two common faults of robot actuations: locked and uncontrollable failure. In this paper, a novel parallel-parallel six-legged robot as our prototype has good fault tolerant capability to continue walking with a locked or uncontrollable leg. The leg sequence and the formula of the leg/body stride length are driven based on gait study and robot kinematics. Then, a continuous fault tolerant gait is proposed which enables the robot maintain high speed and stability.