Towards an Active Spine for Mobile Robots

Kuehn, Daniel; Beinersdorf, Frank; Simnofske, Marc; Bernhard, Felix; Kirchner, Frank

doi:10.3850/978-981-07-7744-9_028

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…However, some other foot designs exist that actively and partially adapt to the environment [41], [42], [43] or have a flat foot with compliant elements within it [44], [45], [46]. For example, a rubber pad is utilized in [44], whereas [45] uses granular material enclosed in an airtight bag that allows the adaptation of the foot with controlled air pressure.…”

Section: State Of the Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design Guidelines for Bioinspired Adaptive Foot for Stable Interaction With the Environment

Ranjan,

Angelini,

Nanayakkara

et al. 2024

IEEE/ASME Trans. Mechatron.

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Robotic exploration in natural environments requires adaptable, resilient, and stable interactions with uncertain terrains. Most state-of-the-art legged robots utilize flat or ball feet that lack adaptability and are prone to slip due to point contact with the ground. In this article, we present guidelines to design an adaptive foot that can interact with the terrain to achieve a stable configuration. The foot is inspired by goat hoof anatomy that incorporates roll and yaw rotations in the Fetlock and Pastern joints, respectively. To ensure adaptability with stability in physical interaction and to prevent the foot from collapsing, we provide a lower bound on each joint's stiffness. In addition, we also render an upper bound to conform to the high force exchange during interactions with the ground consisting of certain roughness. Based on these guidelines, we design the hoof and experimentally validate the theoretical results with a loading test setup in lab settings. We use four different friction materials with various triangular, rectangular, and semicircular extrusions to simulate common ground features. We observe that hooved pads require more load for the system to be unstable. Any anatomically inspired foot can be designed based on the guidelines proved analytically and experimentally in this article.

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Section: State Of the Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design Guidelines for Bioinspired Adaptive Foot for Stable Interaction With the Environment

Ranjan,

Angelini,

Nanayakkara

et al. 2024

IEEE/ASME Trans. Mechatron.

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“…The image on the right shows the side view of the range of motion, whereas the distance between hip and shoulder can also be changed ( x axis). For a more detailed description of the proposed artificial spine design, please see Kuehn, Beinersdorf, Simnofske, Bernhard, & Kirchner ().…”

Section: Mechatronic System Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

System Design and Testing of the Hominid Robot Charlie

et al. 2016

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Current and future application scenarios for mobile robots deal with increased requirements regarding autonomy and flexibility in the locomotor system. To cope with these demands, a high sensor quantity and quality allows us to perform robust locomotion. The authors present a hominid robotic system that is equipped with multi‐point‐contact feet and an active artificial spine to incorporate extended sensing and locomotion capabilities for walking robots. In the proposed robotic system, the front and rear part are connected via an actuated spinal structure with six degrees of freedom. To increase the robustness of the system's locomotion in terms of traction and stability, a footlike structure equipped with various sensors has been developed. Altogether, the robot embodies more than 330 sensors. In terms of distributed local control, the structures feature their own local intelligence and are as autonomous as possible regarding sensing, sensor preprocessing, control, and communication. This allows the robot to respond to external disturbances with minor latency. Within this paper, the proposed robotic system and its distributed and hierarchical control method are presented. To validate the electromechanical and software approach, the authors present results verified experimentally in different environments (in‐ and outdoor) with differing walking speeds on various substrates and in varying inclinations from −20∘ to 20°. The results show that the presented approach is viable and improves the flexibility of the locomotor system. A hominid design was chosen in order to perform various types of locomotion. To demonstrate the entire functionality of the developed hardware, two different motion modes (quadrupedal and bipedal locomotion) are investigated. This also includes a stable transition from a four‐legged posture to an upright posture and vice versa.

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