Pace Gait

A two-beat quadruped gait where both legs on the same side step together, alternating left and right.

The pace is a two-beat gait in quadruped animals: the left front and left hind legs step together, followed by the right front and right hind legs stepping together. It differs from the trot (paired diagonal legs) only in which legs are paired up. Horses have dedicated racing breeds bred for pacing (pacers within the Standardbred breed), and camels naturally move this way. For robots, when both legs on the same side are down, the support line falls to one side of the body and the center of mass isn't directly above it, so the torso tends to rock side to side — which is why quadruped robots more often trot in everyday use. Reinforcement-learning locomotion controllers commonly describe gaits using the phase offsets between legs: Walk These Ways (2022) uses three time-offset parameters, where (0, 0, 0.5) is pacing and (0.5, 0, 0) is trotting; in their tests on randomized rough terrain, pacing had the longest average survival time.

ExampleIn the Walk These Ways controller, setting the gait offset to (0, 0, 0.5) makes the robot dog step with both legs on the left together and both on the right together in turn, rocking its body from side to side as it walks.

Also called

Pacing, Lateral Sequence Gait

Related

Trot Gait · Bound Gait · Gallop Gait · Gait Cycle and Duty Factor · Gait Phase (Phase Clock) · Walk These Ways

Sources

Wikipedia: Horse gait (Pace)
Walk These Ways: Tuning Robot Control for Generalization with Multiplicity of Behavior (arXiv 2212.03238)