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：六足及以上腿数的多足机器人并不常见，尽管具备卓越稳定性、机动性且仅需少量驱动器的设计方案已问世超过20年。这种现象部分原因可能在于：对含滑动运动的多足机器人进行建模并准确预测其本体速度存在困难。本文针对具有多滑动接触点的六足机器人，给出了足部接触力的详细测量方法，并提出一种可预测这些接触力及本体速度的算法。该算法基于近期发表的观察结果——即使存在滑动，多足机器人仍主要遵循运动学特性。我们采用摩擦定律假设，据此可建立形状变化与本体速度的关联，并推导出足部接触力。这使得我们能够对大量潜在滑动腿的运动规划进行仿真模拟。在均匀环境下，该算法的运行时间与规划时域呈（并行）对数复杂度。