A Novel Lockable Spring-Loaded Prismatic Spine to Support Agile Quadrupedal Locomotion

This paper introduces a way to systematically investigate the effect of compliant prismatic spines in quadrupedal robot locomotion. We develop a novel spring-loaded lockable spine module, together with a new Spinal Compliance-Integrated Quadruped (SCIQ) platform for both empirical and numerical rese...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) pp. 2776 - 2783
Main Authors Ye, Keran, Chung, Kenneth, Karydis, Konstantinos
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.10.2023
Subjects
Benchmark testing
Foot
Intelligent robots
Legged locomotion
Quadrupedal robots
Spine
Springs
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Summary:This paper introduces a way to systematically investigate the effect of compliant prismatic spines in quadrupedal robot locomotion. We develop a novel spring-loaded lockable spine module, together with a new Spinal Compliance-Integrated Quadruped (SCIQ) platform for both empirical and numerical research. Individual spine tests reveal beneficial spinal characteristics like a degressive spring, and validate the efficacy of a proposed compact locking/unlocking mechanism for the spine. Benchmark vertical jumping and landing tests with our robot show comparable jumping performance between the rigid and compliant spines. An observed advantage of the compliant spine module is that it can alleviate more challenging landing conditions by absorbing impact energy and dissipating the remainder via feet slipping through much in cat-like stretching fashion.
ISSN:2153-0866
DOI:10.1109/IROS55552.2023.10341427