Stable walking of quadruped robot on unknown rough terrain

Quadruped robot is considered to be the most practical locomotion machine to negotiate uneven terrain, and shows superb stability during static walking. To improve the ability to go over rough terrain, this paper is focused on the stable walking and balance control of quadruped robots. 24 kinds of walking gaits are analyzed in order to derive the most stable and smoothest walking gait. Considering the inefficiency to model a terrain by its specified appearance, a uniform terrain model is established and by means of kinematic analysis, a method to adjust the body posture and center of gravity (COG) height is presented. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and the improvement of the adaptation of quadruped robots on rough terrain.