LAURON V: A versatile six-legged walking robot with advanced maneuverability

Roennau, Arne; Heppner, G.; Nowicki, Michał; Dillmann, Rüdiger

doi:10.1109/aim.2014.6878051

Cited by 93 publications

(90 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…4 and 5 in supplementary material). Our method also differs from passive compliance, which is characterized by physical passive components (e.g., springs and dampers [79]) [80]. In addition, the proposed VAAM is a computational muscle model which can be easily applied to control physical legged robots [21], [38].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive and Energy Efficient Walking in a Hexapod Robot Under Neuromechanical Control and Sensorimotor Learning

Xiong

Wörgötter

Manoonpong

2016

IEEE Trans. Cybern.

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The control of multilegged animal walking is a neuromechanical process, and to achieve this in an adaptive and energy efficient way is a difficult and challenging problem. This is due to the fact that this process needs in real time: 1) to coordinate very many degrees of freedom of jointed legs; 2) to generate the proper leg stiffness (i.e., compliance); and 3) to determine joint angles that give rise to particular positions at the endpoints of the legs. To tackle this problem for a robotic application, here we present a neuromechanical controller coupled with sensorimotor learning. The controller consists of a modular neural network for coordinating 18 joints and several virtual agonist-antagonist muscle mechanisms (VAAMs) for variable compliant joint motions. In addition, sensorimotor learning, including forward models and dual-rate learning processes, is introduced for predicting foot force feedback and for online tuning the VAAMs' stiffness parameters. The control and learning mechanisms enable the hexapod robot advanced mobility sensor driven-walking device (AMOS) to achieve variable compliant walking that accommodates different gaits and surfaces. As a consequence, AMOS can perform more energy efficient walking, compared to other small legged robots. In addition, this paper also shows that the tight combination of neural control with tunable muscle-like functions, guided by sensory feedback and coupled with sensorimotor learning, is a way forward to better understand and solve adaptive coordination problems in multilegged locomotion.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive and Energy Efficient Walking in a Hexapod Robot Under Neuromechanical Control and Sensorimotor Learning

Xiong

Wörgötter

Manoonpong

2016

IEEE Trans. Cybern.

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“…But this requires a higher number of joints compared to wheeled or tracked robots. If we have a look at current walking robots like StarlETH [8], Spot [9], HyQ [10], SpaceClimber [11], LAURON V [12] or MESSOR-2 [13], they all have a great number of joints and the legs are arranged in a star-like configuration. They have special rubber feet to increase the friction and operate in environments with unstable loose objects.…”

Section: Requirements For Simulation Of Multi-legged Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

RoaDS — Robot and dynamics simulation for biologically-inspired multi-legged walking robots

Roennau

Heppner

Klemm

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO)

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Increasing computational power and efficient physics engines make robotic simulations popular and applied in more and more domains and scenarios. Well established simulators like GAZEBO have become an important part in robotics research. Nevertheless, non of the popular simulators addresses the needs of multi-legged walking robots. In this work, we develop an efficient and precise simulation system for multi-legged robots: RoaDS. The requirements, architecture and distributed design are presented. A series of experiments with the six-legged walking robot LAURON evaluates and confirms its high accuracy and good performance. RoaDS is a great tool to compare designs of bio-inspired robots, analyze walking patterns and improve robot walking skills.

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“…And furthermore, the authors investigated the effect of several linear springs of different stiffnesses on reducing impact force after landing and found that such impact can be reduced significantly, even by more than 60%. 6,7 Besides quadruped robots, a series of six-legged robots, like SpaceClimber, 8 LAURON, 9 Scarabaeus, 10 and our robot HITCR-II, 11 were all similarly equipped with linear springs in the distal segments of their legs. In addition to linear mechanical springs, many considerations also went into the approach of achieving variable compliance behavior through smart structures and materials at the end of robotic legs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the utility of leg distal compliance for buffering landing impact of legged robots

Chen

Liu

et al. 2017

Advances in Mechanical Engineering

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Many legged robots have compliant mechanisms in the distal segments of their legs called distal compliance. One important function of such characteristic is to buffer landing impact at touchdown. However, there is still no general design strategy for it. In particular, nonlinear compliance behaviors are supposed to be more beneficial than linear ones, yet it is open what type of nonlinearity is a good fit. From this perspective, we used a simple spring-mass model performing free drop to investigate the design principles of distal compliance. The model includes damping and preload in spring and realistic limitations on spring compression, therefore gives a straightforward correspondence with actual hardware systems. We confirmed the benefits of using distal compliance over purely stiff structures, in terms of landing impact buffering. By assessing the relative influences of a variety of compliance configurations through numerical simulations, we found that for compliance behaviors of the same average stiffness, nonlinearities had little effect on the impact magnitude (\1 N), but stiffening compliance behaviors were able to provide better buffering performance by extending the impact time. It was also noticed that stiffening compliance behaviors were inevitably accompanied by a larger amplitude of spring compression, indicating that necessary trade-off has to be made for those systems concerning torso stationarity. The experimental data with our hexapod robotic platform agreed well with the results found with the proposed model, confirming that the spring-mass model could be a template to provide a useful guide for the design of distal compliance in legged robots.

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LAURON V: A versatile six-legged walking robot with advanced maneuverability

Cited by 93 publications

References 21 publications

Adaptive and Energy Efficient Walking in a Hexapod Robot Under Neuromechanical Control and Sensorimotor Learning

Adaptive and Energy Efficient Walking in a Hexapod Robot Under Neuromechanical Control and Sensorimotor Learning

RoaDS — Robot and dynamics simulation for biologically-inspired multi-legged walking robots

On the utility of leg distal compliance for buffering landing impact of legged robots

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