Abstract: To perform adaptive gait planning and automatic walking in unstructured environment such as the nuclear power plant rescue, a six wheel-legged robot is applied in order to put forward a planning strategy of adaptive robot gait generation based on current terrain. The local terrain ahead of the robot walking in a global environment is identified on-line that determines the type of the elemental terrain and then the corresponding elemental gait forming the gait sequence dynamically. The definition of robot touchdown state is given following its vector expression, and the gait unit is defined using touchdown state and classified with topology matrix expressions. The elemental terrains and the corresponding elemental gaits are proposed with matrix expressions. The gait topology matrix generation procedure is put forward based on terrain recognition that realizes dynamic generation of the robot's gait topology matrix via a recursive algorithm.

Key words: elemental gait, elemental terrain, gait topology, gait unit, wheel-legged robot