Dynamic Stabilisation of the Biped Lucy Powered by Actuators with Controllable Stiffness

1. Front Matter

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Bram Vanderborght

   Pages 1-40

3. Description of Lucy

   • Bram Vanderborght

   Pages 41-91

4. Trajectory Generator

   • Bram Vanderborght

   Pages 93-142

5. Trajectory Tracking

   • Bram Vanderborght

   Pages 143-175

6. Compliance

   • Bram Vanderborght

   Pages 177-213

7. General Conclusions and Future Work

   • Bram Vanderborght

   Pages 215-221

8. Back Matter

   PDF

This book reports on the developments of the bipedal walking robot Lucy. Special about it is that the biped is not actuated with the classical electrical drives but with pleated pneumatic artificial muscles. In an antagonistic setup of such muscles both the torque and the compliance are controllable. From human walking there is evidence that joint compliance plays an important role in energy efficient walking and running. Moreover pneumatic artificial muscles have a high power to weight ratio and can be coupled directly without complex gearing mechanism, which can be beneficial towards legged mechanisms. Additionally, they have the capability of absorbing impact shocks and store and release motion energy. This book gives a complete description of Lucy: the hardware, the electronics and the software. A hybrid simulation program, combining the robot dynamics and muscle/valve thermodynamics, has been written to evaluate control strategies before implementing them in the real biped.

• Artificial Muscles
• Bipedal Locomotion
• Compliant Actuation
• Energy Efficiency
• Robotics

• Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussel, Belgium

  Bram Vanderborght

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