Frame-Coded Legged Locomotion over Noisy Terrain

Abstract

Open-loop multilegged locomotion over rough terrain has been interpreted as matter transport over a noisy channel: leg-ground interactions are discrete basic active contacts, terrain deletes or perturbs those contacts, and spatial redundancy concentrates the resulting thrust and arrival time. That construction is repetition-like because every module carries the same scalar locomotion task. It consequently provides neither a positive task rate nor a decoder that changes with the surviving contact set. Here we formulate locomotion instead as a quantized finite-frame expansion with erasures. A d-dimensional body-level command is mapped into N>d heterogeneous local contact commands. Rough terrain erases or corrupts frame coefficients, while a contact-gated compliant morphology physically realizes the weighted active-subframe decoder. For a linear-Gaussian model, mechanical equilibrium is exactly the posterior mean, tangent stiffness is posterior precision, and mechanical compliance is posterior covariance. Equal-norm Parseval frames are shown to be minimax optimal against one missing contact, two-contact robustness is governed by frame coherence, and a harmonic frame gives a directly realizable gait family. For independently surviving contacts of probability q, random Gaussian gait frames admit exact reconstruction at every analog dimension rate R q. Residual contact noise yields an asymptotic per-mode amplification 1/(q-R) and a vanishing mechanical stiffness margin at the threshold. An information-locomotion inequality and an exact incremental-redundancy rule direct the next gait component toward the softest task-relevant unresolved mode. The resulting analog frame-coding theorem establishes a finite relative redundancy and converse as part of a fundamental limit theory of legged locomotion.