Advanced turning maneuver of a multi-legged robot using pitchfork bifurcation

07/05/2021
by   Shinya Aoi, et al.
0

Legged robots have excellent terrestrial mobility for traversing diverse environments and thus have the potential to be deployed in a wide variety of scenarios. However, they are susceptible to falling and leg malfunction during locomotion. Although the use of a large number of legs can overcome these problems, it makes the body long and leads to many contact legs being constrained on the ground to support the long body, which impedes maneuverability. To improve the locomotion maneuverability of the robots, the present study focuses on dynamic instability, which induces rapid and large movement changes, and uses a 12-legged robot with flexible body axis. Our previous work found that the straight walk of the robot becomes unstable through Hopf bifurcation when the body axis flexibility is changed, which induces body undulations. Furthermore, we developed a simple controller based on the Hopf bifurcation and showed that the straight walk instability facilitates the turning of the robot. In this study, we newly found that the straight walk becomes unstable through pitchfork bifurcation when the body-axis flexibility is changed in a different way from that in our previous work. The pitchfork bifurcation not only induces the straight walk instability but also the transition into the curved walk, whose curvature can be controlled by the body-axis flexibility. We developed a simple controller based on the pitchfork-bifurcation characteristics and demonstrated that the robot can perform a turning maneuver superior to the previous controller based on the Hopf bifurcation. This study provides a novel design principle for maneuverable locomotion of many-legged robots using intrinsic dynamic properties.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

page 5

page 6

page 7

page 8

research
05/12/2021

Mobility-enhanced MPC for Legged Locomotion on Rough Terrain

Re-planning in legged locomotion is crucial to track a given set-point w...
research
07/19/2023

Design of CLARI: A miniature modular origami passive shape-morphing robot

Miniature robots provide unprecedented access to confined environments a...
research
04/09/2023

The Effect of Flagella Stiffness on the Locomotion of a Multi-Flagellated Robot at Low Reynolds Environment

Microorganisms such as algae and bacteria move in a viscous environment ...
research
04/19/2019

Body Lift and Drag for a Legged Millirobot in Compliant Beam Environment

Much current study of legged locomotion has rightly focused on foot trac...
research
10/19/2020

Learning Locomotion Skills in Evolvable Robots

The challenge of robotic reproduction – making of new robots by recombin...
research
05/24/2019

Designing an Inertia Actuator with a Fast Rotating Gyro inside an Egg-shaped Robot

In this paper, we describe features of two new robot prototypes that are...
research
10/09/2019

Development and Testing of an Engineering Model for an Asteroid Hopping Robot

The science and origins of asteroids is deemed high priority in the Plan...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset