Hydraulic-actuated quadruped robot mechanism design optimization based on particle swarm optimization algorithm

In order to implement the ability of carrying heavy loads and adapting to all kinds of terrain for the quadruped robot with hydraulic actuated which takes mule as the bionic prototype, its mechanism design optimization is studied in this paper. Firstly, by establishing the mathematical model for the quadruped robot, the kinematics and dynamics equations describing its motion status are derived, based on which the foot trajectory of the robot would be planned. Then by choosing the entire minimum of the hydraulic flow of one leg as the objective function, the particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) is used to optimize the mechanism design parameters of the robot to get the optimal solutions. Comparing the optimized result with the initial one, the PSO algorithm shows its effectiveness in determining the variables of mechanism design for the robot.