The Walk-&-Roller: A multimodal robotic vehicle capable of quasistatic three-legged rolling motion

This paper presents a new quasi-static gait called end-over-end motion for a 3-legged robot, named the Walk-&-Roller (W&R). In this motion, walking is achieved through rotation of the main body of the robot in three gait phases. The rotational motion is performed by holding the robot on two of the legs and swinging the third over the body into a new forward position. The trajectory planning to achieve this gait is determined in such a way that the static tipover stability is guaranteed and no singularities are reached. Computer simulation and experiments have been executed to demonstrate the validity of this proposed gait method.