Motion Capture and Gait Analysis of Ants with Leg Injuries

Many insects in nature, such as ants, recover quickly after sustaining leg injuries. If this capability could be imparted to multi-legged robots, it would drastically enhance their ability to resist destruction and adapt to the environment. In this paper, the Camponotus Japonicus is used as the research object, and its locomotive patterns are studied under different leg-loss conditions. To facilitate this, a high-speed acquisition system, with a dual-view (bottom view and side view) setup, is designed to analyze the ant's linear gaits. Subsequently, the pivotal gait characteristics of the injured ants are extracted by keyframe annotation technology, including the gait phase diagram, duty factor, angle before support, angle before swing, and leg swing range. Lastly, according to the obtained gait characteristics, the general and specific laws of gait adjustment in the absence of one or two legs are systematically analyzed, which provides the basis for parametric settings and strategy optimization of robotic injured gait self-adjustment.