scholarly journals The Complex Dynamic Locomotive Control and Experimental Research of a Quadruped-Robot Based on the Robot Trunk

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (18) ◽  
pp. 3911 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dongyi Ren ◽  
Junpeng Shao ◽  
Guitao Sun ◽  
Xuan Shao

The research of quadruped robots is fundamentally motivated by their excellent performance in complex terrain. Maintaining the trunk moving smoothly is the basis of assuring the stable locomotion of the robot. In this paper we propose a planning and control strategy for the pacing gait of hydraulic quadruped robots based on the centroid. Initially, the kinematic model between the single leg and the robot trunk was established. The coupling of trunk motion and leg motion was elaborated on in detail. Then, the real-time attitude feedback information of the trunk was considered, the motion trajectory of the trunk centroid was planned, and the foot trajectory of the robot was carried out. Further, the joint torques were calculated that fulfillment minimization of the contact forces. The position and attitude of the robot trunk were adjusted by the presented controller. Finally, the performance of the proposed control framework was tested in simulations and on a robot platform. By comparing the attitude of the robot trunk, the experimental results show that the trunk moved smoothly with small-magnitude by the proposed controller. The stable dynamic motion of the hydraulic quadruped robot was accomplished, which verified the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed control strategy.

Author(s):  
Mehul M Gor ◽  
PM Pathak ◽  
AK Samantaray ◽  
Jung Ming Yang ◽  
SW Kwak

Quadruped robots are designed to work in remote or hazardous environments which are unreachable or harmful for humans. In these situations, reliability and adaptability are the most critical issues for the quadruped robot. During the failure of any actuator, the performance of quadruped robot is severely affected. The failure can lead to joint locking or free joint. In the case of free joint, leg joint loses actuator torque and also the capability to support the robot body on the ground. Leg joint also loses resistance to external load and acts as a free rotating hanging link. This article presents strategies for controlling a compliant legged quadruped robot in the presence of free swinging failure. The strategy is motivated by the natural crawling by infants and adapted crawling by persons with specific disabilities. Bond graph has been used for dynamic modeling of the system. The control strategy has been tested both through simulations and experiments conducted on a prototype quadruped robot.


Author(s):  
Chunsong Zhang ◽  
Xuheng Chai ◽  
Jian S. Dai

The tumble stability indicates the capability to resist the tumble caused by disturbances. For a quadruped robot, the tumble is mainly about the line segment connecting two supporting feet. The tumble stability of quadruped robots is evaluated by various stability criteria based on forces, moments or energies. Work has been done to improve the tumble stability of quadruped robots. Nevertheless, the previous work to achieve this goal relied on motion of legs. No trunk motions were considered. As a matter of fact, trunk motion is widely utilized by natural quadrupeds. By utilizing trunk motion, the quadrupeds are able to regulate the center of gravity to improve the tumble stability level. This paper for the first time investigates the effect of the twisting trunk on the tumble stability of quadruped robots from the viewpoint of energy. Thus it can be seen that the twisting trunk help improve the tumble stability level of quadruped robots. The relationship between the tumble stability and trunk twisting is to be analyzed mathematically, and help find the maximum disturbing energy that the quadruped robot can bear with a twisting trunk and further direct motion of the trunk twisting during tumbles to prevent any overturning.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 172988141773189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taihui Zhang ◽  
Honglei An ◽  
Hongxu Ma

Hydraulic actuated quadruped robot similar to BigDog has two primary performance requirements, load capacity and walking speed, so that it is necessary to balance joint torque and joint velocity when designing the dimension of single leg and controlling its motion. On the one hand, because there are three joints per leg on sagittal plane, it is necessary to firstly optimize the distribution of torque and angular velocity of every joint on the basis of their different requirements. On the other hand, because the performance of hydraulic actuator is limited, it is significant to keep the joint torque and angular velocity in actuator physical limitations. Therefore, it is essential to balance the joint torque and angular velocity which have negative correlation under the condition of constant power of the hydraulic actuator. The main purpose of this article is to optimize the distribution of joint torques and velocity of a redundant single leg with joint physical limitations. Firstly, a modified optimization criterion combining joint torques with angular velocity that takes both support phase and flight phase into account is proposed, and then the modified optimization criterion is converted into a normal quadratic programming problem. A kind of recurrent neural network is used to solve the quadratic program problem. This method avoids tremendous matrix inversion and fits for time-varying system. The achieved optimized distribution of joint torques and velocity is useful for aiding mechanical design and the following motion control. Simulation results presented in this article confirm the efficiency of this optimization algorithm.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaofeng Liu ◽  
Jiahong Xu ◽  
Yuhong Liu

Purpose The purpose of this research on the control of three-axis aero-dynamic pendulum with disturbance is to facilitate the applications of equipment with similar pendulum structure in intelligent manufacturing and robot. Design/methodology/approach The controller proposed in this paper is mainly implemented in the following ways. First, the kinematic model of the three-axis aero-dynamic pendulum is derived in state space form to construct the predictive model. Then, according to the predictive model and objective function, the control problem can be expressed a quadratic programming (QP) problem. The optimal solution of the QP problem at each sampling time is the value of control variable. Findings The trajectory tracking and point stability tests performed on the 3D space with different disturbances are validated and the results show the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy. Originality/value This paper proposes a nonlinear unstable three-axis aero-dynamic pendulum with less power devices. Meanwhile, the trajectory tracking and point stability problem of the pendulum system is investigated with the model predictive control strategy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongwu Zhu ◽  
Dong Wang ◽  
Nathan Boyd ◽  
Ziyi Zhou ◽  
Lecheng Ruan ◽  
...  

Dynamic quadrupedal locomotion over rough terrains reveals remarkable progress over the last few decades. Small-scale quadruped robots are adequately flexible and adaptable to traverse uneven terrains along the sagittal direction, such as slopes and stairs. To accomplish autonomous locomotion navigation in complex environments, spinning is a fundamental yet indispensable functionality for legged robots. However, spinning behaviors of quadruped robots on uneven terrain often exhibit position drifts. Motivated by this problem, this study presents an algorithmic method to enable accurate spinning motions over uneven terrain and constrain the spinning radius of the center of mass (CoM) to be bounded within a small range to minimize the drift risks. A modified spherical foot kinematics representation is proposed to improve the foot kinematic model and rolling dynamics of the quadruped during locomotion. A CoM planner is proposed to generate a stable spinning motion based on projected stability margins. Accurate motion tracking is accomplished with linear quadratic regulator (LQR) to bind the position drift during the spinning movement. Experiments are conducted on a small-scale quadruped robot and the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified on versatile terrains including flat ground, stairs, and slopes.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fei Qi ◽  
Bai Chen ◽  
Shigang She ◽  
Shuyuan Gao

Purpose This paper aims to present a shape sensing method and feedback control strategy based on fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor to improve the control accuracy of the robot and ensure the safety of the cardiac interventional surgery. Design/methodology/approach To theoretically describe the shape of the catheter robot, the kinematic model is established by the geometric analysis method. And to obtain the actual shape, a large curvature assemble sensor based on FBG is adopted and a novel simple shape reconstruction model is proposed, which can provide the shape curve and distal position. In addition, the influence of external load on the bending deformation is investigated by experiments. To improve the shape accuracy of the robot, a shape feedback control method is presented to control the catheter robot, which can control the robot to bend into the pre-given desired shape. Findings Experiment results verify the effectiveness of the shape sensing method and the reconstruction model, and the correlation coefficients of three sets of curve in different coordinate directions are 0.9986, 0.9992 and 0.9999. Results of the shape feedback experiment show that the curvature error and direction angle error are 1.42% and 10.3%, respectively. The continuum catheter robot can be controlled to achieve the desired bending shape. Originality/value The shape reconstruction method and feedback control strategy proposed in this paper can improve the control accuracy of the robot to avoid the risk of the collision with the surrounding blood vessels, the tissues and organs.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petrus Sutyasadi ◽  
Manukid Parnichkun

This paper proposed a control algorithm that guarantees gait tracking performance for quadruped robots. During dynamic gait motion, such as trotting, the quadruped robot is unstable. In addition to uncertainties of parameters and unmodeled dynamics, the quadruped robot always faces some disturbances. The uncertainties and disturbances contribute significant perturbation to the dynamic gait motion control of the quadruped robot. Failing to track the gait pattern properly propagates instability to the whole system and can cause the robot to fall. To overcome the uncertainties and disturbances, structured specified mixed sensitivityH∞robust controller was proposed to control the quadruped robot legs’ joint angle positions. Before application to the real hardware, the proposed controller was tested on the quadruped robot’s leg planar dynamic model using MATLAB. The proposed controller can control the robot’s legs efficiently even under uncertainties from a set of model parameter variations. The robot was also able to maintain its stability even when it was tested under several terrain disturbances.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chunsong Zhang ◽  
Chi Zhang ◽  
Jian S. Dai ◽  
Peng Qi

Abstract To date, most quadruped robots are either equipped with trunks that are rigid bodies or consist of blocks connected by passive joints. The kinematic performance of these quadruped robots is only determined by their legs. To release the mobility of trunks and enhance the performance of quadruped robots, this paper proposes a metamorphic quadruped robot with a moveable trunk (a planar six-bar closed-loop linkage), called MetaRobot I, which can implement active trunk motions. The robot can twist its trunk like natural quadrupeds. Through trunk twisting, the stability margin of the quadruped robot can be increased compared with that of a quadruped robot with a rigid trunk. The inner relationship between the stability margin and the twisting angle is analyzed in this paper. Finally, simulations are carried out to show the benefits facilitated by the twisting trunk to the quadruped robot.


Author(s):  
Lucas Ginzinger ◽  
Benjamin Heckmann ◽  
Heinz Ulbrich

A new approach to control a rubbing rotor by applying an active auxiliary bearing has been developed. The control force is applied indirectly using the auxiliary bearing, only in case of rotor rubbing. The auxiliary bearing is actuated using two unidirectional actuators. A three-phase control strategy has been developed which stabilizes the rotor system in case of an impact load and effectively avoids “backward whirling” which is very destructive. As soon as the load ceased the auxiliary bearing is separated from the rotor again and normal operation mode is continued. During the normal operation state, the feedback control does not interfere with the rotor system at all. A test rig has been developed to experimentally verify the control system. Various experiments show the success of the control strategy. In case of rubbing, the contact forces are reduced up to 95 percent. At the same time, the rotor deflection is decreased too. The activation and deactivation of the control system is operated fully automatically. A simulation framework for an elastic rotor including the non-smooth nonlinear dynamics of contacts is presented, which has been used to develop the feedback controller.


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