A Pneumatically Actuated Quadrupedal Walking Robot

This paper describes the mechanical design and control of a pneumatic quadrupedal robot. Additionally, the authors propose a method of joint control that combines stance/swing gain scheduling with open-loop damping, the combination of which provides stable joint level control, without the oscillatory behavior associated with pneumatically actuated walking robots. A set of joint trajectories are described to provide stable walking. The joint trajectories and joint-level controllers are implemented on the pneumatic quadruped and experimentally shown to provide stable walking without significant (unwanted) oscillations of the body or legs. Further, the robot´s normalized speed and payload capacity are experimentally characterized. The robot´s performance in these metrics is shown to be highly competitive within the published literature.