Authors:
Małgorzata Kameduła
;
Navvab Kashiri
;
Darwin G. Caldwell
and
Nikos G. Tsagarakis
Affiliation:
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy
Keyword(s):
Gazebo-ROS Simulators, Legged Robots, Flexible Joint Robots, Series Elastic Actuators, Quadrupeds, Humanoids, Simulation.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Engineering Applications
;
Industrial Engineering
;
Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics
;
Intelligent Control Systems and Optimization
;
Modeling, Simulation and Architectures
;
Robotics and Automation
;
Signal Processing, Sensors, Systems Modeling and Control
;
System Modeling
;
Systems Modeling and Simulation
Abstract:
Despite the important role of simulation in the development and control of robotics systems, the majority of
open source simulation tools has however paid no attention to the progress and paradigm change on the robot
design in the past 15 years with the consideration of soft actuation technologies as a mean to power new robotic
systems. More specifically, the integration of series elastic actuators (SEAs) into robots modifies significantly
the dynamics characteristics of the system while the incorporation of the passive compliance into the actuators
is not applied in conventional simulators. This paper introduces a scheme for the implementation of the
SEA dynamics on a Gazebo-ROS framework exploited for the simulation of a new centaur-like robot. This
approach is based on designing a custom control plugin embodying the passive compliance dynamics so that
the controller associated with each joint receives both collocated and non-collocated feedback. A simulation
comparison with Matlab
validating the performance of the designed control plugin is demonstrated. In the
end, a whole-body simulation of the centaur robot driven/controlled by the proposed plugin is presented.
(More)