Back handspring robot: target dynamics-based control

This paper reports on a gymnastic robot, which are developed for various floor exercises such as jumping, somersault and back handspring. The robot is a planar and serially connected four-link robot, whose joints are fully actuated by electric servomotors. In this paper, the modeling and the controller for back handspring are addressed. The controller is derived from task-specific target dynamics and its model matching. The use of global physical quantities such as center of mass, or angular momentum allows even simple target dynamics to generate complex gymnastic motions of multi-body system. The effectiveness of the controller is confirmed via simulations and experiments.