Bioinspired Legged Robot Design via Blended Physical and Virtual Impedance Control

Autor: Omid Mohseni, Aida Mohammadi Nejad Rashty, Andre Seyfarth, Koh Hosoda, Maziar Ahmad Sharbafi
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems. 105
ISSN: 1573-0409
0921-0296
DOI: 10.1007/s10846-022-01631-2
Popis: In order to approach the performance of biological locomotion in legged robots, better integration between body design and control is required. In that respect, understanding the mechanics and control of human locomotion will help us build legged robots with comparable efficient performance. From another perspective, developing bioinspired robots can also improve our understanding of human locomotion. In this work, we create a bioinspired robot with a blended physical and virtual impedance control to configure the robot’s mechatronic setup. We consider human neural control and musculoskeletal system a blueprint for a hopping robot. The hybrid electric-pneumatic actuator (EPA) presents an artificial copy of this biological system to implement the blended control. By defining efficacy as a metric that encompasses both performance and efficiency, we demonstrate that incorporating a simple force-based control besides constant pressure pneumatic artificial muscles (PAM) alone can increase the efficiency up to 21% in simulations and 7% in experiments with the 2-segmented EPA-hopper robot. Also, we show that with proper adjustment of the force-based controller and the PAMs, efficacy can be further increased to 41%. Finally, experimental results with the 3-segmented EPA-hopper robot and comparisons with human hopping confirm the extendability of the proposed methods to more complex robots.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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