Hydraulic drive mode enables legged robots to have excellent characteristics, such as greater power-to-weight ratios, higher load capacities, and faster response speeds than other robots. Nowadays, highly integrated valve-controlled cylinder, called the hydraulic drive unit (HDU), is employed to drive the joints of these robots. However, there are some common problems in the HDU resulted from hydraulic systems, such as strong nonlinearity, asymmetry dynamic characteristics between positive and negative moving directions of the piston rod, and time-varying parameters. It is difficult to obtain the desired control performance by just using classical control methods such as the traditional PID control. In this paper, a position controller that combines fuzzy terminal sliding mode control (FTSMC) and time delay estimation (TDE) is proposed, in which FTSMC adopts a compound reaching law which combines the tangent function and the exponential reaching law. Moreover, the fuzzy control is introduced to adjust the parameters of the reaching law in real time to improve the adaptability of FTSMC. Based on FTSMC, the external uncertain disturbance of the HDU position control system is estimated by TDE, which ensures the simplicity of system modeling and the normal application of FTSMC. Finally, the control effects of the controller combining FTSMC and TDE are verified on the HDU performance test platform and the load simulation experiment platform. The experimental results show that the proposed controller greatly improves the system position control performance and has a strong disturbance rejection ability and a good adaptability under different working conditions. The above research results can provide an important reference and experimental basis for the inner loop of compliance control of legged robots.

An evaluation model of aluminum alloy welded joint low-cycle fatigue data based on information entropy is proposed. Through calculating and analyzing the information entropy of decision attributes, quantitative contribution of stress concentration, plate thickness, and loading mode to the fatigue destruction are researched. Results reveal that the total information entropy of the fatigue data based on nominal stress, structural stress and equivalent structural stress are, respectively, 0.9702, 0.8881, and 0.8294. There is consistency between the reducing trend of the weight-based information entropy and the smaller and smaller standard deviation of the S-N curves. In the structural stress based S-N curve, total stress concentration factor is crucial for the distribution of the fatigue data and the weight based information entropy of membrane stress concentration factor is 0.6754, which illustrates that stress concentration is a key issue of welded structure to which ought to be attached great importance. Subsequently, in the equivalent structural stress-based S-N curve, the weight based information entropy of stress ratio is 0.5759, which plays an important role in the distribution of fatigue data. With the importance level of the attributes on the S-N curves investigated, the correction of R in the equivalent structural stress based master S-N curve method should be carried out to make the welding fatigue prediction much more accurate.

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Spot welding of dissimilar materials can utilize the respective advantage comprehensively, of which reliable prediction of fatigue life is the key issue in the structure design and service process. Taking into account almost all the complex factors that have effects on the fatigue behavior such as load level, thickness, welding nugget diameter, vibrational frequency, and material properties, this article proposed an energy dissipation-based method that is able to predict the fatigue life for spot-welded dissimilar materials rapidly. In order to obtain the temperature gradient, the temperature variations of fourgroup spot-welded joint of SUS301 L-DLT stainless steel and Q235 carbon steel during high-cycle fatigue tests were monitored by thermal infrared scanner. Specifically, temperature variation disciplines of specimen surface were divided into four stages: temperature increase, temperature decrease, continuous steady increase in temperature, and ultimate drop after the fracture. The material constant C that a spot-welded joint of dissimilar material needs to reach fracture is 0.05425°CÁmm 3. When the specimen was applied higher than the fatigue limit, the highest error between experimental values and predicted values is 18.90%, and others are lower than 10%. Therefore, a good agreement was achieved in fatigue life prediction between the new method and the validation test results.

A hydraulic drive unit (HDU), applied in each joint of a hydraulic driven legged robot, usually adopts the impedance control outer loop based on the hydraulic position or the force control inner loop during the motion process. When the hydraulic control adopts closed-loop force control, its control performance can directly determine the control performance of the impedance control outer loop. Therefore, it is significant to design a high-accuracy force control method aimed at HDUs. In this paper, aiming at the above research concept, the force control system of the HDU is introduced first, and the lack of the force control performance is studied under different working conditions on the HDU performance test platform. Second, a model-based variable input controller (MVIC) is designed to improve the force control performance. Finally, the control performance of the MVIC is verified on the HDU performance test platform. The experimental results show that the MVIC can greatly improve the force control accuracy under different working conditions and that the controller has good robustness. The above research results can provide important reference and lay the experimental foundation for force-based impedance control. INDEX TERMS Legged robot, hydraulic drive unit (HDU), force control, model-based variable input control (MVIC).