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Pronking is a legged locomotory gait in which all legs are used in synchrony, usually resulting in slow speeds but long flight phases and large jumping heights that may potentially be useful for mobile robots locomoting in cluttered natural environments. Instantiations of this gait for robotic systems suffer from severe pitch instability either due to underactuated leg designs, or the open-loop nature of proposed controllers. Nevertheless, both the kinematic simplicity of this gait and its dynamic nature suggest that the Spring-Loaded Inverted Pendulum Model (SLIP), a very successful predictive model for both natural and robotic runners, would be a good basis for more robust and maneuverable robotic pronking. In the scope of thesis, we describe a novel controller to achieve stable and controllable pronking for a planar, underactuated hexapod model, based on the idea of &ldquo / template-based control&rdquo / , a controller structure based on the embedding of a simple dynamical template within a more complex anchor system. In this context, high-level control of the gait is regulated through speed and height commands to the SLIP template, while the embedding controller based on approximate inverse-dynamics and carefully designed passive robot morphology ensures the stability of the remaining degrees of freedom. We show through extensive simulation experiments that unlike existing open-loop alternatives, the resulting control structure provides stability, explicit maneuverability and significant robustness against sensor noise.

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