Natural Gait Generation Techniques for Principally Kinematic Mechanical Systems

In this paper we present a novel gait analysis technique which can directly be used to synthesize gaits for a broad class of mechanical systems. We build upon prior work in locomotion mechanics, however we take a different approach to generate gaits that yield absolute motion of the mechanical system. We present a systematic analysis to control all parameters of a proposed type of gait which eliminates the need for intuition and guesswork as was required in the prior work. The main contribution of the paper is relating position change or motion in the ber space to a volume integral bounded by closed curves on a two dimensional manifold embedded in the base space or shape space of the robot. Not only does our method remove the restriction of using sinusoidal gaits as was the case in the prior work but it also allows for generating optimal gaits by solving a variational problem rather than solving a dynamic programming problem as was the case in the prior work.