科创中国

原文链接：万方

• 作者：

  CHEN Dongliang,LIU Qi,DONG Litao,WANG Hong,ZHANG Qun

• 摘要：

  Most of current running quadruped robots have similar construction: a stiff body and four compliant legs. Many researches have indicated that the stiff body without spine motion is a main factor in limitation of robots' mobility. Therefore, investigating spine motion is very important to build robots with better mobility. A planar quadruped robot is designed based on cheetahs' morphology. There is a spinal driving joint in the body of the robot. When the spinal driving joint acts, the robot has spine motion; otherwise, the robot has not spine motion. Six group prototype experiments with the robot are carried out to study the effect of spine motion on mobility. In each group, there are two comparative experiments: the spinal driving joint acts in one experiment but does not in the other experiment. The results of the prototype experiments indicate that the average speeds of the robot with spine motion are 8.7%–15.9% larger than those of the robot without spine motion. Furthermore, a simplified sagittal plane model of quadruped mammals is introduced. The simplified model also has a spinal driving joint. Using a similar process as the prototype experiments, six group simulation experiments with the simplified model are conducted. The results of the simulation experiments show that the maximum rear leg horizontal thrusts of the simplified mode with spine motion are 68.2%–71.3% larger than those of the simplified mode without spine motion. Hence, it is found that spine motion can increase the average running speed and the intrinsic reason of speed increase is the improvement of the maximum rear leg horizontal thrust.

• 关键词：

  quadruped robot spinal driving joint spine motion mobility locomotion experiment

• 作者单位：

  College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Harbin Engineering University

• 基金项目：

  Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.51205075)

• 来源期刊：

  中国机械工程学报(英文版)

• 年，卷(期)：

  2014006