OPTIMIZING FOURIER SERIES BASED GAITS FOR MODULAR ROBOTS USING AN EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHM

摘要

A new method of controlling and optimizing robotic gaits for a modular robotic system is presented in this paper. A robotic gait is implemented on a robotic system consisting of three Mobot modules for a total of twelve degrees of freedom using a Fourier series representation for the periodic motion of each joint. The gait implementation allows robotic modules to perform synchronized gaits with little or no communication with each other making it scalable to increasing numbers of modules. The coefficients of the Fourier series are optimized by a genetic algorithm to find gaits which move the robot cluster quickly and efficiently across flat terrain. Simulated and experimental results show that the optimized gaits can have over twice as much speed as randomly generated gaits.