Sideways crab-walking is faster and more efficient than forward walking for a hexapod robot

Articulated legs enable the selection of robot gaits, including walking in different directions such as forward or sideways. For longer distances, the best gaits might maximize velocity or minimize the cost of transport (COT). While animals often have morphology suited to walking either forward (like insects) or sideways (like crabs), hexapod robots often default to forward walking. In this paper, we compare forward walking with crab-like sideways walking. To do this, a simple gait design method is introduced for determining forward and sideways gaits with equivalent body heights and step heights. Specifically, the frequency and stride lengths are tuned within reasonable constraints to find gaits that represent a robot's performance potential in terms of speed and energy cost. Experiments are performed in both dynamic simulation in Webots and a laboratory environment with our 18 degree-of-freedom hexapod robot, Sebastian. With the common three joint leg design, the results show that sideways walking is overall better (75% greater walking speed and 40% lower COT). The performance of sideways walking was better on both hard floors and granular media (dry play sand). This supports development of future crab-like walking robots for future applications. In future work, this approach may be used to develop nominal gaits without extensive optimization, and to explore whether the advantages of sideways walking persist for other hexapod designs.