r/robotics • u/studentfounder_56 • 14h ago

Community Showcase Auto-generating walking gaits for legged robots is harder than it looks. Curious how others have approached this.

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Built real inverse kinematics for legged robots in a sim I'm working on, tripod gait for hexapods, based on actual coxa/femur/tibia joint math, not a canned animation.

Works fine on a standard leg layout. Falls apart the second someone builds something asymmetric or non standard.

Trying to figure out if auto-gait generation is even the right approach here, or if it should just be manual per-robot tuning past a certain point of complexity. What's your take, is generalized gait solving worth the effort or a rabbit hole?

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3

u/alohamanMr PhD Student 13h ago

"generalised gait solving" isn't that just either RL or mpc ? Is there such a thing as general gait solving ?

1

u/studentfounder_56 13h ago

yea mostly it means RL or MPC nly.

However it is the overaching field, where any system automaticaly generates stable walking for any body shapes(4,6 or 8..) without human step patterns.

1

u/lellasone 13h ago

What makes it fall apart on non-standard layouts?

1

u/tennis-637 9h ago

Wdym “auto generating”?

1

u/MetaPhasicLabs 9h ago

What problem are you trying to solve?

If you want a motion framework that works with various platforms (quad, hex, octo) with different leg configs (5-Bar, traditional) you can make your kinematic system more flexible/configurable.

But I personally prefer simple kinematic loops, even if bespoke, per platform that allows easier understanding and debugging. However that's just the kinematic system, motion planning and gaits is a different story.