Passive dynamic walking of combined rimless wheel and its speeding-up by adjustment of phase difference

Abstract

The design and modeling of a segmented myriapod millirobot with a compliant body is presented. A dynamic model is used to demonstrate how body undulations can result from only varying the phase difference in the stance change between adjacent segments -even with passive intersegmental connections -and how these gaits affect locomotion. Different gaits are demonstrated experimentally in a 20-leg, 2.2 gram millirobot, and the resulting motion is compared to that predicted by the simulation. Both simulation and experiments show that undulatory gaits can increase the average speed of straight-line locomotion as compared to non-undulatory gaits for the same stepping frequency. The model and the millirobot can be used concurrently with biological studies to understand aspects of myriapod locomotion. This robot is also a useful tool to gain insight into how flexibility can be introduced into robots at this scale to enhance locomotion.

Role of deceleration effect in efficient and fast convergent gait generation

“…Furthermore, through the analysis of serni PDW, the importance of a time delay was suggested. Now we are conducting the experimental tests using our prototype CRW machine [5]. The results will be reported in a future paper.…”

“…In this paper, we add convergence speed as a criterion for evaluation of the gait efficiency, and discuss the trade-offs between it and other criteria. For gait analysis, we introduce the model of an active combined rimless wheel (CRW ) that consists of two identical rimless wheels [5] without having the phase difference between the fore and rear legs. This model is 1 F. Asano and X. Xiao are with the School of Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 1-1 Asahidai, Nomi, Ishikawa 923-1292, Japan {fasano, xxiao}@ j aist .…”

Adaptive internal impedance control for stable walking on uncertain visco-elastic terrains

“…Use of passive dynamics to improve the stability and efficiency of legged locomotion has been the focus of several studies in the recent past [16], [31], [32]. In [27] the authors propose to have permanent springs with damping at the foot of a biped robot in order to be dynamically coupled with the environment.…”

Gait analysis and efficiency improvement of passive dynamic walking of combined rimless wheel with wobbling mass

“…For simplicity, the rear RW is called "RW1", and the fore one is called "RW2". The CRW model is identical to that in our previous work (see [4] for further detail). We then add a passive wobbling mass to the body frame.…”

“…Remy et al investigated a quadruped walker that consists of two compass-like biped and numerically showed that the fore and rear legs' motion synchronizes [3]. Inoue et al investigated modeling and analysis of PDW of a combined rimless wheel (CRW) that consists of two identical eight-legged rimless wheels (RWs), and showed that speeding-up is achieved by adjusting the phase difference between the fore and rear legs through numerical simulations [4]. The validity was also confirmed by using an experimental machine.…”