Origami Pump Actuator Based Pneumatic Quadruped Robot (OPARO)

Abstract

In this study, we proposed an origami pump actuator based pneumatic quadruped robot (OPARO). The robot was constructed with a four-leg system controlled by only two motors. Specifically, the forelegs and hindlegs are pneumatically coupled to operate simultaneously with a tendon-driven system. The forelegs simultaneously performs pumping and actuating to supply air to the hindlegs, and the hindlegs are passively actuated by the air supply from the forelegs. We conducted a series of experiments to evaluate the mobility performance of OPARO. We measured the posture of each leg and analyzed the movement to determine the operating mechanism in locomotion. The motion, gait, and repeatability of OPARO were analyzed from the experimental results. Additionally, we conducted a parametric study to determine the tendencies at different gait frequencies and motor inputs. The OPARO moves at a maximum velocity of 0.11 body length per second (10.29 mm/s). Furthermore, we evaluated the gait velocity with various gait patterns according to different duty ratios and floor surfaces. Moreover, the steering performance of OPARO was demonstrated. We found that the tendon-driven pneumatic origami pump actuator system is adequate for a quadruped robot without an external air supply system.

The Kresling origami spring: a review and assessment

“…An actual demonstration of the operation of a KOS as a linear displacement pump was performed by Lee et al [118], where they used the pump to drive a soft pneumatic actuator (figure 27(b)). Another work carried out by Kim et al [117,182] integrated the pump operation of the KOS with a robotic system. They proposed and evaluated a novel origami-based self-supplying pneumatic quadruped robot (figure 27(c)), which has a four-leg system controlled by two motors.…”

4D Multiscale Origami Soft Robots: A Review

“…Numerous practical applications of 4D multiscale origami soft robots have been proposed, including locomotion robots [ 71 , 86 , 123 , 155 , 156 , 157 , 158 , 159 ], grippers [ 37 , 86 , 92 , 142 ], wheels [ 139 ], robotic arms [ 160 ], and exoskeletons [ 161 , 162 ]. In this section, we discuss diverse origami soft robots, including actuators, fluidic devices, biomedical grippers, and locomotion robots.…”

Design Optimization for Rough Terrain Traversal Using a Compliant, Continuum-Joint, Quadruped Robot

“…There has been some work on multi-legged soft or compliant robots [see Zhang et al (2021) ; Kim et al (2021) ]. Perhaps the paper most similar to our work uses an evolutionary algorithm to optimize the shape of a soft robot leg [see Morzadec et al (2019) ].…”