Development Of Software Environment For The Kinematic Analysis Of A Quadruped Robot

A quadruped robot has been considered as a vehicle having large stability margin among walking robots and pantograph leg permits large stride while providing mutual independency between vertical and horizontal movements. A quadruped robot with pantograph legs, however, has complicat- ed kinematic characteristics to be analyzed. In order to figure. out the kinematic characteristics of three dimensional legged motions of the walking robot, we present a modeling method for three different quadruped robots with pantograph legs, which have different joint driving mechanisms. And the kine- matics, inverse kinematics and geomemcal description of constraints in pantograph mechanisms are considered for anima- tion. Particularly, motions of legs for rotation and side walking are considered in graphic simulation. Multiple windows are used to achieve efficient man-machine communication. It is showed that the software environment can be used for the simulation of various algorithms related to walking robots.