Trot Gait

A quadruped gait where diagonal leg pairs touch down together and the two pairs alternate.

The trot originally describes a horse's gait: the left front and right rear leg form one pair, the right front and left rear form the other, and the two pairs alternate touching down — a two-beat rhythm, with a moment where all four hooves leave the ground between beats when a horse trots fast. It's also the most common basic gait for quadruped robots. Compared to other two-beat gaits: pacing moves both legs on the same side together, bounding pairs the two front legs and the two back legs, and pronking lifts and lands all four legs together. During a trot, only two feet are usually on the ground at once, so the support polygon collapses to a diagonal line — the robot can't stand still stably and needs continuous stepping to maintain dynamic balance; the benefit is front-back and left-right symmetry and a wide usable speed range.

ExampleMIT's Walk These Ways (2022) used a single policy to switch among multiple gaits on a Unitree Go1, describing each leg's touchdown timing with three phase offsets: (0.5, 0, 0) is a trot, (0, 0, 0) is a synchronized four-leg pronk, (0, 0.5, 0) is a bound, and (0, 0, 0.5) is a pace; a separate stepping-frequency parameter, e.g. 3 Hz, means each foot touches down 3 times per second.

Also called

Trotting

Related

Gait · Pace Gait · Bound Gait · Gallop Gait · Gait Cycle and Duty Factor · Support Polygon

Sources

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