Frog-inspired jumping robot actuated by pneumatic muscle actuators

Jun Zhong,Minzhou Luo,Jie Zhao,Jizhuang Fan,Xiaofeng Liu

doi:10.1177/1687814018782303

Abstract

Jumping robots can be widely applied in archeology, interstellar probe, antiterrorism, and resource exploration. This article adopts the frog as the bionic object and briefly analyzes biological features and jumping movements in a complete jumping sequence of the frog. Then an equivalent six-bar mechanism model depicting frog jumping movement is built up, and the optimizing simulation of the six-bar mechanism model is performed. On the basis of the optimized results, the robot is designed and prototype is manufactured. An adaptive cascade controller is proposed to control the robot. Proportional–integral–derivative parameters of the controller are tuned online using radial basis function neural network to deal with nonlinearities of the robot. Jumping experiment demonstrates the jumping capacity of the robot and the ability of the proposed controller in tracking the desired trajectories.

Highlights

Mobile robots have great progress in recent years and various robots, such as wheeled robots,[1] hopping robots,[2] and crawl robots,[3] have been developed
To reduce the weight of the robot, gears and cams were made of polyoxymethylene (POM) material and polyether ether ketone (PEEK) was adopted for manufacturing the robot’s body
The cascade controller is realized in the microcontroller to achieve closed-loop control of the robot joints

Summary

Introduction

Mobile robots have great progress in recent years and various robots, such as wheeled robots,[1] hopping robots,[2] and crawl robots,[3] have been developed. Compared to wheeled or tracked robots, jumping robots go forward via the jumping movement and own good obstacle-crossing ability. In special fields such as alien detection and resource exploration where terrains are complex, jumping robots have an attractive application prospect. M Kovac et al.[5] designed a miniature locust-like jumping robot with 5 cm height and 7 g weight. This miniature robot consisted of feet, thigh, body, infrared receiver, and lithium battery. Thigh and body were connected by two torsional springs and the jumping energy was supplied by a micromotor.

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion