Analysis of a Simple Mechanism for Building Multilegged Robotic Systems

We propose a one-degree-of-freedom mechanism based on a modified Hoeken´s linkage, to build multilegged robots, where each leg can be controlled independently. We present the design equations of the linkage to determine the size of the elements from the length of a desired stride. We show an application example to obtain a linkage whose stride has the average length of a human adult step. The mechanism is easy-to-build, to control and to synchronize, since it is a crank-rocker linkage with only revolute joints. It allows the generation of several step patterns.