Gait

The sequence and rhythm in which a legged animal or robot's legs lift and touch down while moving.

Gait refers to the timing pattern of when each leg touches down and lifts off during legged locomotion. It's commonly described with two quantities: duty factor, the fraction of a gait cycle a leg spends on the ground (above 50% is generally considered walking, below 50% running), and the phase offsets between legs. Common quadruped gaits include the trot (diagonal leg pairs together), the pace (same-side leg pairs together), the bound (front pair and rear pair each together), the pronk (all four legs together), and the gallop; humanoid robots mainly alternate between two-legged walking and running gaits. Traditional controllers usually fix the gait timing first and then plan footholds and support forces around it; reinforcement-learning locomotion controllers can let a gait emerge naturally from just a velocity command, or take gait frequency and inter-leg phase offsets as explicit command inputs to specify which gait to use.

ExampleWalk These Ways specifies a quadruped's gait using three inter-leg phase offsets: (0.5, 0, 0) is trotting, (0, 0.5, 0) is bounding, (0, 0, 0.5) is pacing, and all zeros is pronking — the same policy can switch gaits just by changing this input.

Also called

Gait Pattern, Locomotion Gait

Related

Trot Gait · Pace Gait · Bound Gait · Gait Cycle and Duty Factor · Gait Planning · Legged Locomotion

Sources

Wikipedia: Gait（duty factor, symmetrical/asymmetrical gaits）
Walk These Ways: Tuning Robot Control for Generalization with Multiplicity of Behavior (arXiv:2212.03238)