Gallop Gait

The fastest quadruped gait: all four feet touch down in sequence, slightly offset, with a phase where the whole body is airborne.

The gallop is a high-speed, asymmetric gait in quadruped animals: the two front legs, or the two rear legs, don't touch down at exactly the same time — they're slightly offset, producing a four-beat footfall pattern, and each cycle also includes a suspension phase where all four feet leave the ground at once. It's the horse's fastest gait, averaging roughly 40–48 km/h, and the faster the pace, the longer the suspension phase; a greyhound's double-suspension rotary gallop has two suspension phases per cycle, one with the spine curled and one extended, using large spinal flexion to lengthen its stride. It differs from the bound gait (front pair together, rear pair together) in whether the left and right legs within each pair are offset. For robots, the gallop has a long airborne time and short per-leg ground contact, and the torso's center of mass can't be directly controlled during the suspension phase, making it harder to execute than a trot. MIT's Mini Cheetah used MPC combined with whole-body impulse control to demonstrate six gaits, including the gallop.

ExampleWhen a horse gallops leading with its right front leg, the footfall order is left-hind, right-hind, left-front, right-front, followed by all four feet leaving the ground together before the next cycle begins.

Also called

Gallop, Rotary Gallop

Related

Gait · Bound Gait · Trot Gait · Flight Phase (Aerial Phase) · Quadruped Robot · MIT Mini Cheetah

Sources

Wikipedia: Horse gait（Gallop）
Wikipedia: Greyhound（double suspension rotary gallop）
Kim et al. 2019, Highly Dynamic Quadruped Locomotion via Whole-Body Impulse Control and Model Predictive Control