A four legged walking robot with obstacle overcoming capabilities

The paper deals with the four legged walking robot Guará, built with obstacle overcoming capabilities. It was designed as a research robot platform, to be used in indoor environment, walking straight and curved paths and detecting and overcoming known obstacles. Straight paths are done with gait matrix strategy and curved paths are accomplished by the four legs which have differential strokes in inclined paths relatively to the robot longitudinal axis. Obstacle overcoming is done using only information from contact sensors installed on the robot's feet. Complex movements and tracking sequences are proposed to be built from a small group of simple movements sequenced according to the contact keys switching sequence. Results include: gait generation for straight and curved paths; integrated movement sequence to go one step up in the floor; and a description of the Guara quadruped robot.