Electronic Coordination of Joint Motions for Terrain-Adaptive Robot Vehicles

Significant advances in mobility for off-road vehicles may be possible through active control of suspension system articulations. This concept seems to be particularly appropriate to robot vehicles guided remotely by a human operator. This paper presents a general discussion of the motion coordination problems which must be solved by a control computer for vehicles of this type and presents some laboratory results obtained with an experimental six-legged walking machine. It is concluded that the state of knowledge and the availability of hardware is sufficient to justify consideration of practical applications of this class of machines including both vehicles with and without a rolling element in contact with the ground.