Design and Control of a Novel Six-Legged Skating Robot With Skateboards

This article presents a novel six-legged robot for skating on ice and on flat and compact terrains. Imitating human skating, we innovatively designed two skateboards, which can be equipped with passive wheels or ice skates. Each of the two middle leg tips has a rubber end or a sharp tip for ice. Then, a new skating gait is developed, which consists of a skating motion planner (SMP) and a centroid balance controller (CBC). In the SMP, two middle legs act as swing legs to slide to the ground to obtain velocity through the quadratic program considering reaction force constraints. In the CBC, the four legs on the skateboards are always in the stance phase to keep the body balance. Meanwhile, the position and the posture of two skateboards are corrected in real time. Furthermore, the nonlinear mapping between the body velocity and gait parameters is solved by the response surface methodology of Minitab software to realize velocity control and rapid skating. In addition, we developed the braking motion, the walking gait, and the swizzling gait. Finally, we conducted velocity control and accelerated skating experiments on slippery terrain. The results show that the accuracy of velocity control is all over 95%, and the robot could successfully accelerate and skate at 2.17 m/s.