Design of a robot leg with elastic energy storage, comparison to biology, and preliminary experimental results

This paper presents a novel robot leg design. The leg is powered by a DC motor which drives elastic tendons to turn a foot. The tendons store elastic energy just as in nature. Preliminary experimental results show the leg has a well-defined resonance which can be exploited to produce hopping. We also offer a comparison of our leg with the cat hindlimb. Eventually, the leg will be part of a quadrupedal robot.

[1]  B. Hannaford,et al.  Actuator Properties and Movement Control: Biological and Technological Models , 1990 .

[2]  K. V. Papantoniou Electromechanical design for an electrically powered, actively balanced one leg planar robot , 1991, Proceedings IROS '91:IEEE/RSJ International Workshop on Intelligent Robots and Systems '91.

[3]  B. Walmsley,et al.  Comparison of stiffness of soleus and medial gastrocnemius muscles in cats. , 1981, Journal of neurophysiology.

[4]  T. McMahon The role of compliance in mammalian running gaits. , 1985, The Journal of experimental biology.

[5]  M H Raibert,et al.  Trotting, pacing and bounding by a quadruped robot. , 1990, Journal of biomechanics.

[6]  I. Stewart,et al.  Coupled nonlinear oscillators and the symmetries of animal gaits , 1993 .

[7]  G. Loeb,et al.  Feedback gains for correcting small perturbations to standing posture , 1991 .

[8]  M. D. Berkemeier,et al.  Coupled oscillations in a platform with four springy legs and local feedback , 1995, Proceedings of 1995 34th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

[9]  Marc Raibert,et al.  Control of hoof rolling in an articulated leg , 1991, Proceedings. 1991 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.