Multi-legged robots with six or more legs are not in common use, despite designs with superior stability, maneuverability, and a low number of actuators being available for over 20 years. This may be in part due to the difficulty in modeling multi-legged motion with slipping and producing reliable predictions of body velocity. Here we present a detailed measurement of the foot contact forces in a hexapedal robot with multiple sliding contacts, and provide an algorithm for predicting these contact forces and the body velocity. The algorithm relies on the recently published observation that even while slipping, multi-legged robots are principally kinematic, and employ a friction law ansatz that allows us to compute the shape-change to body-velocity connection and the foot contact forces. This results in the ability to simulate motion plans for a large number of potentially slipping legs. In homogeneous environments, this can run in (parallel) logarithmic time of the planning horizon

翻译：六足及以上多足机器人尽管在设计上具有卓越的稳定性、机动性，且二十多年来已有使用较少驱动器的可用方案，但仍未得到广泛应用。这在一定程度上源于对含滑移的多足运动进行建模并可靠预测机体速度的困难。本文详细测量了具有多个滑动接触点的六足机器人的足地接触力，并提出了一种预测这些接触力及机体速度的算法。该算法基于近期发表的观测结果：即使在滑移状态下，多足机器人仍主要遵循运动学规律，并采用摩擦定律假设，从而能够计算形状变化与机体速度之间的关联以及足地接触力。由此，我们得以模拟大量潜在滑移腿的运动规划。在均匀环境中，该算法可在规划时域的对数时间内（并行）运行。