The Design and Control of a Prototype Quadruped Microrover

We describe the design, construction and control of a quadruped robot which walks on uneven terrain. A control system which produces a statically stable gait has been implemented; results showing a straight and turning gait are presented. The control of quadruped robots poses interesting challenges due to a small stability margin (when compared to hexapods for example). For this reason most implemented systems for outdoor walking on uneven terrain have been hexapods. The system described here has the added virtue of using very few inexpensive sensors and actuators. One of the aims of this work is to build a reduced complexity (low power, low mass and direct drive) walking robot for statically stable walking. The other aim is to compare the performance of this robot with a wheeled robot roughly the same size and weight. In this paper we report on progress towards the first of these two goals using a traverse across an obstacle field as an example.