STUDY OF A DISTRIBUTED CONTROL ARCHITECTURE FOR A QUADRUPED ROBOT

Looking at legged robots, it is sometimes very important to take into account some of the practical aspects (when focusing on theoretical ones) in order to implement control-command levels. In this way, we have treated the problem of the realization of dynamic or quasi-dynamic gaits with a quadruped robot using a new approach from which we have derived an efficient control/command scheme. This is based on a simple consideration which lies in the fact that the Dynamic Model (DM) can be decomposed into two main parts. From our point of view, we consider a part devoted to the command of the legs which could be called a Leg Inverse Dynamic Model (LIDM). We consider a second part dealing with the global characteristics of the platform. At this level, one can control the system. It will be called the LPIM (Leg to Platform Interaction Model). This goal is reached assuming a dichotomy in a distributed architecture and by the way we present it. Further justification of our method will be given in several stages throughout the paper. We paid great attention to time-saving considerations with respect to communication protocols and data exchange at the same level and between the three levels we derived from our basic investigations.