Legless soft robots capable of rapid, continuous, and steered jumping

Jumping is an important locomotion function to extend navigation range, overcome obstacles, and adapt to unstructured environments. In that sense, continuous jumping and direction adjustability can be essential properties for terrestrial robots with multimodal locomotion. However, only few soft jumping robots can achieve rapid continuous jumping and controlled turning locomotion for obstacle crossing. Here, we present an electrohydrostatically driven tethered legless soft jumping robot capable of rapid, continuous, and steered jumping based on a soft electrohydrostatic bending actuator. This 1.1 g and 6.5 cm tethered soft jumping robot is able to achieve a jumping height of 7.68 body heights and a continuous forward jumping speed of 6.01 body lengths per second. Combining two actuator units, it can achieve rapid turning with a speed of 138.4° per second. The robots are also demonstrated to be capable of skipping across a multitude of obstacles. This work provides a foundation for the application of electrohydrostatic actuation in soft robots for agile and fast multimodal locomotion.

Jumping robot: A pneumatic jumping locomotion across rough terrain

This paper presents a jumping mechanism using pneumatic actuators adopted in a traditional robotic vehicle’s frame. This is a skeleton for future development on this technology. This is a simple mechanism to overcome obstacles on its way in a robotic vehicle. As we know a traditional wheeled robotic vehicle can not over come an obstacle on ease as it doesn’t have an effective mechanism or it might take an other alternative long route to reach the target. This mechanism has an effective design to overcome obstacles comparing to the traditional robot vehicles. So this model has a higher mobility, flexibility and rapidity. This design has a new type of locomotion to it that is jumping along with wheeled movement which is not present in a traditional robot. This mechanism works from the real time information from the sensors. There are 4 double acting cylinders placed at equidistant from each other and mass distribution of the whole model has been equally divided and each cylinder has the same load. These 4 cylinders are pneumatically actuated as compressed air as source. When these cylinders are actuated there is rapid pressurizing which causes the jump. These cylinders are actuated when the relay receives signal from the sensor module that there is an obstacle ahead. As we know there are many kind of locomotion of robots are been developed these days like wheeled, tracked, crawling, walking and so on but all these robots have difficulty in overcoming obstacle on their way, if it is modified to overcome obstacle too their would be a complex design which in this model is not the case as it has a very simple design. This mechanism is designed to take over rough terrains and uneven and unknown terrains. As a overall outcome we were able to make the robot overcome the obstacles on its way in its unique way.

Locomotion Identification Method of one-DOF Six-Bar for Jumping Robot

Exploring the locomotion of creatures is a challenging task in bionic robots, and the existing iterative design methods are mainly based on one or two characteristics to optimize robots. However, it is hard to obtain other features. Here, we introduced the thinking of system identification theory to the bionic robots, averting the exploration of the dynamics and reducing the difficulty of design greatly. A one-DOF six-bar mechanism (Watt I) was designated as the model to be identified, and it was divided into two parts, i.e. a one-DOF four-bar linkage and a three-DOF series arm. Then we formed constraints and a loss function. The parameters of the model were identified based on the kinematic data of a marmoset jumping. As a result, we obtained the desired model. Then, a prototype derived from the model was fabricated, and the experiments verified the effectiveness of the method. Our method also can be applied to other motion simulation scenarios.

Marsbot: A monopod robot capable of achieving three-dimensional dynamic and stable jumping

Continuous, stable and accurate jumping in three-dimensional (3D) environment is one of difficulties of jumping robot research. In this paper, a monopod jumping robot Marsbot whose center of mass (CoM) can accurately reach desired positions in 3D space is designed. Based on the spring loaded inverted pendulum (SLIP) dynamics model, the take-off velocity control of Marsbot was realized, which made controllable continuous jump possible. Based on the reaction wheel pendulum (RWP) dynamics model and the law of conservation of angular momentum, the real-time 3D attitude control of Marsbot with three inertial tails was realized. By integrating SLIP model, RWP model and the post-landing steering strategy proposed in this paper, a continuous jump algorithm for CoM of Marsbot to accurately reach desired 3D positions is proposed. This paper proposes the air target grasping strategy of Marsbot (the author will elaborate on this issue in another article): When the robot jumps to the desired grasping position in the air, the robotic arm can quickly and stably grasp the target object such as tree branches, so that the robot can perch or hang on the target object, and get a good view from high place. The simulation results show that Marsbot can achieve continuous, stable, accurate jumping and realize air perching/observation operations through the above schemes. The simulation results also verify feasibility of the 3D jump dynamics model and its control algorithm proposed in this paper.