A study of the effect of structural damping on gait stability in quadrupedal locomotion using a musculoskeletal robot

Author

Miki, Kenji ; Tsujita, Katsuyoshi

Author_Institution

Dept. of Biomed. Eng., Osaka Inst. of Technol., Osaka, Japan

fYear

2012

fDate

7-12 Oct. 2012

Firstpage

1976

Lastpage

1981

Abstract

This study reports on a feasibility study on the stability of gait patterns with changeable body stiffness. The periodic motions of the legs are generated as a rhythmic motion. The stability of locomotion strongly depends on the mechanical properties of the body mechanism, especially joint stiffness. In this report, the muscle tone of the robot´s motion at the trunk can be changed by using the changeable elasticity of pneumatic actuators. The stability of quadruped locomotion in crawl, trot and pace patterns with changeable body stiffness was evaluated with hardware experiments. As well, the stabilization mechanism is approximated by a simple two-inertia model and analyzed with numerical simulations.

Keywords

damping; elastic constants; legged locomotion; motion control; pneumatic actuators; robot kinematics; stability; body mechanism; changeable body stiffness; changeable elasticity; crawl pattern; gait pattern stability; joint stiffness; leg periodic motion generation; mechanical property; musculoskeletal robot; numerical simulation; pace pattern; pneumatic actuators; quadruped locomotion stability; quadrupedal locomotion; rhythmic motion; robot motion; stabilization mechanism; structural damping; trot pattern; trunk muscle tone; two-inertia model; Legged locomotion; Numerical stability; Pneumatic actuators; Robot kinematics; Stability analysis;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on

Conference_Location

Vilamoura

ISSN

2153-0858

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-1737-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IROS.2012.6386256

Filename

6386256