Reactive Leveling on the Ambler Walking Machine

Abstract Walking robots depend on the terrain that they are stepping on for support. When walking on unstructured natural terrain these supports may fail - endangering the safety of the robot. A reactive control method, reactive leveling, has been developed for such an event. It is shown that reactive leveling works in bringing the machine to level from unstructured support failures. However, the sensors used to measure body inclination should be chosen carefully in order to obtain appropriate mechanism response.