Abstract
In this paper, a single leg platform for quadruped robots is designed based on the motivation of high-speed locomotion. The leg is designed for lightweight and low inertia with a structure of three joints by imitating quadruped animals. Because high acceleration and extensive loadings will be involved on the legs during the high-speed locomotion, the trade-off between the leg mass and strength is specifically designed and evaluated with the finite element analysis. Moreover, quadruped animals usually increase stride frequency and decrease contact time as the locomotion speed increases, while maintaining the swing duration during trot gait. Inspired by this phenomenon, the foot-end trajectory for quadruped robots with a high-speed trot gait is proposed. The gait trajectory is planned for swing and stance phase; thus the robot can keep its stability with adjustable trajectories while following a specific gait pattern. Especially for the swing phase, the proposed trajectory can minimize the maximum acceleration of legs and ensure the continuity of position, speed, and acceleration. Then, based on the kinematics analysis, the proposed trajectory is compared with the trajectory of Bézier curve for the power consumption. Finally, a simulation with Webots software is carried out for verifying the motion stability with two trajectory planning schemes respectively. Moreover, a motion capture device is used for evaluating the tracking accuracy of two schemes for obtaining an optimal gait trajectory suitable for high-speed trot gait.
Highlights
Legged robots are more suitable for applications with rough terrain and complex cluttered environments compared to wheeled robots [1,2,3]
Different from that, quadruped robots equipped with electric actuators can even be used to indoor environments, such as SpotMini [7], ANYmal [8], and MIT Cheetah [9,10,11]
It can be found that the swing inertia of the knee joint, which mainly provides the movement in the vertical direction, is very low and its movement is very flexible
Summary
Legged robots are more suitable for applications with rough terrain and complex cluttered environments compared to wheeled robots [1,2,3]. Hydraulic drive quadruped robots, such as Big Dog [5] and HyQ [6], make use of the characteristics of the high power density of hydraulic pressure to realize a stronger carrying capacity and motion ability. Their large noise and size have limited their applications to outdoor applications. Different from that, quadruped robots equipped with electric actuators can even be used to indoor environments, such as SpotMini [7], ANYmal [8], and MIT Cheetah [9,10,11].
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