Walking program

Abstract

This chapter describes the OWL walking program that implements strategies suggested by those described in “Animal walking” on page 7. For a description of the OWL language, see “OWL language” on page 67. The first section of this chapter is a description of the basic requirements of a walking program. The next section is a description of the interleg communication mechanisms, called inhibition and excitation, that are used to satisfy those requirements. After the section on inhibition and excitation comes a brief description of the important parts of walking program itself, which is basically the concurrent combination of a collection of independent and interdependent processes. The processes fall into two groups: the service processes that are responsible for maintaining various pieces of system state, and the six leg control processes. There are quite a few service processes because I chose to make each one simple and devoted to a single task.

This code is made for walking… —(apologies to) Nancy Sinatra