Geometric Mechanics of Contact-Switching Systems

Discrete and periodic contact switching is a key characteristic of steady-state legged locomotion. This letter introduces a framework for modeling and analyzing this contact-switching behavior through the framework of geometric mechanics on a toy robot model that can make continuous limb swings and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE robotics and automation letters Vol. 8; no. 12; pp. 8343 - 8349
Main Authors Prasad, Hari Krishna Hari, Hatton, Ross L., Jayaram, Kaushik
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Piscataway IEEE 01.12.2023
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects
Contact switching
Foot
Gait
hybrid system
Kinematics
Legged locomotion
Locomotion
Mechanics (physics)
Model forms
no-slip constraint
optimal gaits
quasistatic walking
Robot kinematics
Robots
stratified panels
Switching
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Summary:Discrete and periodic contact switching is a key characteristic of steady-state legged locomotion. This letter introduces a framework for modeling and analyzing this contact-switching behavior through the framework of geometric mechanics on a toy robot model that can make continuous limb swings and discrete contact switches. The kinematics of this model form a hybrid shape-space and by extending the generalized Stokes' theorem to compute discrete curvature functions called stratified panels , we determine average locomotion generated by gaits spanning multiple contact modes. Using this tool, we also demonstrate the ability to optimize gaits based on the system's locomotion constraints and perform gait reduction on a complex gait spanning multiple contact modes to highlight the method's scalability to multilegged systems.
ISSN:2377-3766
2377-3766
DOI:10.1109/LRA.2023.3327930