justifies the simplifying assumptions used. In
dynamic walking, however, all ground reaction force
components are treated independently as outlined next.
4.3 Ground Support on Two Legs and
During Airborne
In dynamic gaits such as trot and pace, the robot
maintains ground contact with only two legs at any
given time. Under these conditions, the reaction force
problem becomes more tractable, as the system
involves only six unknown ground reaction force
components, three per contact point, which can be
determined directly from the equations of motion
without necessitating additional assumptions or
constraints.
Conversely, during a pronk gait, the robot enters
an aerial phase wherein all limbs are off the ground,
resulting in zero ground contact. Consequently, the
ground reaction forces at the feet are identically zero.
This absence of external contact forces simplifies the
system dynamics, allowing for direct computation of
the internal reaction forces and moments exerted by
the legs on the robot’s body based solely on its inertial
properties and joint torques.
5 FORWARD DYNAMICS
With the forward dynamic formulation, the objective
is to determine the acceleration components
corresponding to the generalized coordinates
assuming the knowledge of the input torque vector.
The focus of this study is on two different gait
patterns, namely the static walking gait and the
dynamic trotting gait.
In the case of a static walking gait, three legs
maintain ground contact at any instant of time. This
statically stable support configuration allows the
estimation of the robot body's pose through the
known joint angles of the supporting legs. Under the
assumption of static equilibrium and using forward
kinematic relations, the system is described by twelve
generalized coordinates, corresponding to the three
joint angles 𝜃
,
, 𝜃
,
, 𝜃
,
for each of the four legs,
resulting in a total of twelve joint coordinates. On the
other hand, during the dynamic trotting gait, only two
diagonally opposed legs are in contact with the
ground at any given moment, which results in a
reducing the support polygon to a line. The associated
body rotation cannot be determined solely from the
displacement of the attachment points of the two
supporting legs. To address this limitation, the roll
angle ∅ of the quadruped system is introduced as an
additional generalized coordinate, increasing the total
number of generalized coordinates to thirteen.
The accelerations of the generalized coordinates,
twelve in the case of the static walking gait and
thirteen in the case of the dynamic trotting gait, are
obtained through the forward dynamics formulation.
The resulting accelerations are numerically integrated
twice to obtain the joint velocities and displacements.
The body’s orientation and angular rates are
subsequently determined through forward
kinematics, as described in the previous section. To
evaluate the dynamic model, the inverse dynamics
formulation based on the Newton-Euler recursive
algorithm is used to numerically compute the
system’s inertia matrix, as well as the gravity,
Coriolis, and centrifugal torque vectors (Harib &
Srinivasan, 2003; Walker & Orin, 1982).
Once the inertia matrix, Coriolis and centrifugal
torque vector, and gravity torque vector have been
computed, they are combined with the input torque
vector, generated by the control law, to solve for the
joint acceleration vector as shown in (5). This
acceleration vector is then numerically integrated
twice to obtain the joint velocity and displacement
vectors.
𝒒
= 𝑀
𝒒
𝝉−𝑪
𝒒, 𝒒
−𝑮(𝒒)
)
(5)
A comprehensive analysis of the system dynamics,
control implementation, and experimental validation
are presented in (Sureshkumar, 2025).
6 SIMULATION RESULTS
A simulation was conducted in Simulink to validate
the proposed dynamic formulation. This section
presents a brief overview of the open-loop control
results, wherein the acceleration, velocity, and
displacement vectors obtained from the forward
dynamics are compared against the corresponding
vectors derived from the desired trajectory, computed
using inverse kinematics.
Fig. 4, illustrates the path planning profile for the
dynamic trotting gait, depicting the positional
trajectories of both the robot’s body and the end-
effectors (feet) over the course of the gait cycle. These
trajectories serve as essential inputs for the inverse
kinematics computation, which subsequently yields
the desired joint angle trajectories required to achieve
the planned motion. For the dynamic trotting gait, as
depicted in Figure 5.7, the back-right (BR) and front-
left (FL) legs move in unison during one step phase,
followed by the back-left (BL) and front-right (FR)