Fault Tolerant Free Gait and Footstep Planning for Hexapod Robot Based on Monte-Carlo Tree

These authors contributed equally to this work. Abstract--Legged robots can pass through complex field environments by selecting gaits and discrete footholds carefully. Traditional methods plan gait and foothold separately and treat them as the single-step optimal process. However, such processing causes its poor passability in a sparse foothold environment. This paper novelly proposes a coordinative planning method for hexapod robots that regards the planning of gait and foothold as a sequence optimization problem with the consideration of dealing with the harshness of the environment as leg fault. The Monte Carlo tree search algorithm(MCTS) is used to optimize the entire sequence. Two methods, FastMCTS, and SlidingMCTS are proposed to solve some defeats of the standard MCTS applicating in the field of legged robot planning. The proposed planning algorithm combines the fault-tolerant gait method to improve the passability of the algorithm. For rule-based method, when walking in complicated terrain, which leads them to execute motor tasks a periodic gait, assuming that all footsteps are valid, legged on fields such as field rescue and planetary exploration in robots move forward in a fixed swing sequence, which is the future. The hexapod robots that have higher stability usually taken as 3+3 tripod gait, 4+2 quadruped gait or 5+1 and superior load capacity than biped robots and quadruped wave gait for hexapod robots[7]. Because these gaits are robots are widely used[1][2][3].