Locomotion through Morphosis

Robots have been around for more than fifty years, but still they are mostly
seen in factorys where they are working in a fixed and controlled environ-
ment. Almost since the dawn of robots there have been a hope they some
day would be useful in other places than in the factories, however, this is still
not the case. One of the reasons for this is that science does still not fully
understand the principles of dynamic locomotion which is a requirement for
them to move around in our environment with stairs, obstacles etc.
In this thesis the focus will be on the creation of the modular robotic
construction kit called LocoKit, which is intended as a system on which
studies on locomotion can be done in a simple way. The simplicity is ob-
tained by giving the user the opportunity to build legged robots from a
set of small components which allows for adjusting various parameters on
the robot, even after it have been build. This will hopefully help to identify
which parameters that are affecting the locomotive abilities of a legged robot
the most.
Experiments shows that the system in its current state is able for form
legged robots of various kinds, and perform walking gaits where phenomenon’s
also seen in nature can be found and tested. These results shows the poten-
tial of LocoKit and are nicely in line with the goal of the project.
I future development, LocoKit will be improved in such a way that it
allows the user to build even more efficient robots than have been build until
now.