Development of quadruped walking robot TITAN-VIII

We discuss the development of the quadruped walking robot TITAN-VIII, especially about its leg mechanism and results of experiments using a one-leg model. In the design of TITAN-VIII, we have considered not only about "high performance of the movement" but also about "low cost", "simplicity of the treatment", "simplicity of the functional extension", etc. We introduce a driving system using wires, which is helpful to achieve these objectives. We first constructed a one-leg model of TITAN-VIII. By using this model, we did experiments and made remarks about the feature of response, velocity, force and energy consumption. From these results, we estimated the limitation of the walking velocity of TITAN-VIII in standard walking posture. We discuss the standard walking posture of TITAN-VIII based on the energy efficiency.