Follow Path with Steps also using path: wrong direction

Question

so I'm trying to make a little robot, and I made it walk using a trick I seen on youtube, that uses a circle path with my iks to make a quick and easy steps cycle. It works... right up until I put my robot on a larger path to follow with its armature, to move around. As long as it's rotated the same as the circle path, the steps go the right way. But when it reachs a point where it started to turn around, its starts stepping backward. Some pictures to better explain: Red: the way the leg moves for its step, which in this part of the body path, is the right way. Yellow is the direction the bot advance in, using said body path. Blue is the circle I use for the steps follow path

And then when it's coming back around: The step still spin the same way, but the robot doesn't advance the same direction. So it's doing red when I want it to do green:

I tried rotating the circle but....

It doesn't seem a good idea. At all. So I'm not sure what to do. If I could rotate the circle I'd be set I'd keyframe it to rotate correctly, but I've no idea if that's possible, or if I'm focusing on the wrong thing and the solution is something else.

Here is the file as well:

Answer 1

I found a solution. I'm not sure if there's a better one, but this worked for me in the end:

Shape keys.

I used shape keys on the circle curve for the steps to make it rotate along the path as the robot walks.

This required a lot of keyframes because I couldn't automate the process. Shape keys only range from 0 to 1, not in degrees. Additionally, rotating by 180 degrees with shape keys caused the vertices to be squished through the center and back out to the other side, inverting them (similar to scaling rather than rotating). So, I had to create 8 shape keys (for every 90-degree increment, relative to each other, both left and right).

But eventually, I got it to work.