Abstract
Due to their ability to avoid obstacles and to move over difficult terrain, moreover having the ability to adjust their posture, walking machines for many years have been considered as very promising devices for inspection, exploration and surveyance tasks, however still they have not been widely applied. One of the main limitations is the power supply. Six legged walking machines are robust from the point of view of their walking stability in difficult terrain, but their actuators (18 if each leg has active 3 DOF’s) adds to their weight what increases the energy consumption. The higher energy consumption requires more efficient batteries, but usually those are heavier, what again increases the energy demand. Therefore at the design stage a detailed analysis is required of how to decrease the energy consumption. This paper studies energy consumption considering the tripod gait of hexapods. The method used for energy evaluation is presented and the results are discussed. The discussion of energy saving both for the leg transfer phase and during the support phase, which is the most demanding phase, is presented. The energy consumption is expressed in the normalized form, depending on the normalized leg proportions, body height and step length. The straight line forward/backward and side walking are analyzed. The aim of the studies is to provide to the designers the information about favorable leg proportions taking into account the reduction of required energy and to provide the information which leg posture should be selected.
Highlights
For many years multi-legged walking machines have been considered as appropriate devices for security, inspection and exploration tasks
Authors come to the conclusion that the peaks of joint torques and leg end-forces in hexapod gait decrease when the duty factor of a sixlegged robot gait increases
The same research group tested the relation between that hexapod leg posture and energy consumption concluding that energy saving is associated with insect type posture [26]
Summary
For many years multi-legged walking machines (machines with more than 2 legs) have been considered as appropriate devices for security, inspection and exploration tasks. In comparison with the wheeled robots they have better ability to move in unstructured environment, i.e. over uneven terrain They can climb over obstacles and avoid ditches. Success of LS3 confirms the expectations that walking machines having greater motion abilities are a good option in special applications. They are the emerging kind of professional robots. In [15] five rules for selecting hexapod body height, motion velocity, footholds, the gait duty factor, and the step length were proposed, taking into account energy efficiency. In [23, 24] the effect of gait parameters such as duty factor, walking speed and leg stroke on energy spending during turning motion was investigated.
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