Authors:
Navvab Kashiri
;
Arash Ajoudani
;
Darwin G. Caldwell
and
Nikos G. Tsagarakis
Affiliation:
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy
Keyword(s):
Leg Kinematics Design, Quadrupeds, Legged Robots, Force Manipulability/Polytope, Dynamic Manipulability/Polytope.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Engineering Applications
;
Industrial Engineering
;
Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics
;
Intelligent Control Systems and Optimization
;
Mobile Robots and Autonomous Systems
;
Performance Evaluation and Optimization
;
Robot Design, Development and Control
;
Robotics and Automation
;
Signal Processing, Sensors, Systems Modeling and Control
Abstract:
As a major inspiration of biologically inspired systems, multi-legged robots have been developed due to their
superior stability feature resulting from their large support polygon. The leg design of a majority of such robots
is motivated by the skeleton of vertebrates such as dogs, or that of invertebrates such as spiders. Despite a
wide variety of multi-pedal robots on the basis of the two aforesaid leg designs, a thorough comparison of
the two underlying design principles remains to be done. This work addresses this problem and presents a
comparative study for the two mammal-like and spider-like designs by looking at the joint torque profile, the
responsive motion of the legs, and the thrust force applied by the robot. To this end, a set of performance
indexes are defined based on the gravity compensation torque, the dynamic manipulability polytope and the
force polytope, and evaluated in various leg configurations of the two designs.