Leg Selectable Interface forWalking Robots on Irregular Terrain

Legged robots are expected to walk on irregular terrain with their high ground adaptability. Working in irregular environments, the robot is required to keep safe, that is, it is necessary to consider the terrain. This ability is difficult to be installed to the robots due to not enough intelligence and experience. Here, we focus that human can guess and estimate the safety foot position with global environmental recognition and prediction. We propose leg selectable interface for walking robots on irregular terrain. This time, we introduced this system into a quadruped robot. Proposed interface employ four fixed cameras above each foot to show the ground condition of around foot. The operator selects the object (each leg or main body) with the touch panel, and operates its position with the joystick. Our interface displayed a lot of information as robot condition. Additionally, to improve the stability of the robot, we install the two kinds of corrections, one is correction by robot's center of gravity and another is correction by leg angle. We verify the effect of above compensation with an experiment by a real machine. As a result, it was possible to walk by avoiding the obstacle, the robot was able to be stabilized by the correction.