Abstract
In order to approach the performance of biological locomotion in legged robots, better integration between body design and control is required. In that respect, understanding the mechanics and control of human locomotion will help us build legged robots with comparable efficient performance. From another perspective, developing bioinspired robots can also improve our understanding of human locomotion. In this work, we create a bioinspired robot with a blended physical and virtual impedance control to configure the robot’s mechatronic setup. We consider human neural control and musculoskeletal system a blueprint for a hopping robot. The hybrid electric-pneumatic actuator (EPA) presents an artificial copy of this biological system to implement the blended control. By defining efficacy as a metric that encompasses both performance and efficiency, we demonstrate that incorporating a simple force-based control besides constant pressure pneumatic artificial muscles (PAM) alone can increase the efficiency up to 21% in simulations and 7% in experiments with the 2-segmented EPA-hopper robot. Also, we show that with proper adjustment of the force-based controller and the PAMs, efficacy can be further increased to 41%. Finally, experimental results with the 3-segmented EPA-hopper robot and comparisons with human hopping confirm the extendability of the proposed methods to more complex robots.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Guoping Zhao, Ferréol Gagey, Ayoob Davoodi, and Ryu Takahashi for providing experimental support in this study.
Funding
Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. ThisThis work was supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft - DFG) funded EPA Project [grant number AH307/2-1] and [grant number SE1042/29-1], and EPA 2 Project [grant number AH307/4-1].
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Omid Mohseni is the corresponding author of the article, contributed in the simulation modeling, carried out the robot experiments, implemented control approaches both in simulations and experiments, prepared the results, and contributed in data analysis and drafting the manuscript. Aida Mohammadi Nejad Rashty carried out the human hopping experiments, worked on acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of experimental human data, and contributed in doing the robot experiments. Andre Seyfarth made substantial contributions to the conception of the work, contributed in interpretation of data, discussions, and commenting on and writing the article. Koh Hosoda also contributed in conception of the study, and revised it critically for important intellectual content. Maziar Ahmad Sharbafi was responsible for the conception of the work, designing and supervising both human and robot simulations/experiments, analysis and interpretation of data, and writing the manuscript. All authors gave final approval for participation.
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Mohseni, O., Rashty, A.M.N., Seyfarth, A. et al. Bioinspired Legged Robot Design via Blended Physical and Virtual Impedance Control. J Intell Robot Syst 105, 22 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-022-01631-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-022-01631-2