Abstract
The development of functional legged robots has encountered its limits in human-made actuation technology. This paper describes research on the biomimetic design of legs for agile quadrupeds. A biomimetic leg concept that extracts key principles from horse legs which are responsible for the agile and powerful locomotion of these animals is presented. The proposed biomimetic leg model defines the effective leg length, leg kinematics, limb mass distribution, actuator power, and elastic energy recovery as determinants of agile locomotion, and values for these five key elements are given. The transfer of the extracted principles to technological instantiations is analyzed in detail, considering the availability of current materials, structures and actuators. A real leg prototype has been developed following the biomimetic leg concept proposed. The actuation system is based on the hybrid use of series elasticity and magneto-rheological dampers which provides variable compliance for natural motion. From the experimental evaluation of this prototype, conclusions on the current technological barriers to achieve real functional legged robots to walk dynamically in agile locomotion are presented.
Highlights
The development of functional legged robots has encountered its limits in human-made actuation technology
States of America, which has given a boost to the topic through a significant number of programs sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the last ten years [2]
(Hybrid Actuator Development) project [8] developed at the Centre for Automation and Robotics at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) aims primarily at solving this problem by establishing a new line of research focused on specific actuation and control technologies for the new generation of legged robots: Agile-locomotion robots
Summary
Legged locomotion is attracting the interest of researchers of a broad range of areas. The HADE (Hybrid Actuator Development) project [8] developed at the Centre for Automation and Robotics at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) aims primarily at solving this problem by establishing a new line of research focused on specific actuation and control technologies for the new generation of legged robots: Agile-locomotion robots Quadruped robots, emulating their biological counterparts, are the best choice for field missions in a natural environment. Some research labs are working in this direction (Stanford University [22], Italian Institute of Technology [23]), the only existing robot reaching those targets is BigDog [4], a quadruped under development at Boston Dynamics (USA) The ins and outs of the technology underlying BigDog are not available to the research community
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