Scientists Discover Super-Fast "Bipod" Gait for Six-Legged Robots

Researchers at EPFL have discovered a faster and more efficient gait, never observed in nature, for six-legged robots walking on flat ground. When vertebrates run, their legs exhibit minimal contact with the ground. Insects are different - the six-legged creatures run fastest using a three-legged, or 'tripod' gait where they have three legs on the ground at all times (two on one side of their body and one on the other). The tripod gait has long inspired engineers who design six-legged robots. The EPFL researchers found that bipod gaits, where only two legs are on the ground at any given time, are faster and more efficient – although in nature no insects actually walk this way.

Transcript

00:00:00 for a long time roboticists have been inspired by nature in designing their robots for example when looking at how to construct six legged robots they're inspired by insects. In insects if you look across many different species use the same locomotor strategy for moving fastest: they use the tripod gait. it's a movement in synchrony of the front and rear legs on one side of the animal with the middle

00:00:26 leg on the other when you don't have adhesion which insects use to crawl up walls or on ceilings or other three dimensional surfaces you actually can move more quickly using what we call a bipod gait. A bipod gait is a dynamically stable gait that allows the robot to use two legs on the ground at once instead of three to move more quickly through the environment. To test

00:00:46 this actually was the best strategy for six-legged motion we developed a insect model in simulation and actually essentially re-evolved locomotor strategies for this model. We took this hexapode robot, and we tried the tripod gait and the bipod gait, and what we saw is that the bipod gait was always faster and this confirmed our results from simulation. But insects don't use the

00:01:10 bipod gait so why might this be? We saw in simulation that adhesion might be the reason why the tripod gait is there, so we asked ourselves what happens if we block adhesion in the real insect. So we put little polymer boots which block the adhesion and saw that the tripod gait was disappearing and what we saw actually is more of a bipod like pattern

00:01:34 so these results show how we can control robots to move more quickly and efficiently on the ground and also informed biologist for why it is that insects move the way they do through the world