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Contribution Details

Type Conference Presentation
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title The Effect of Spine Actuation and Stiffness on a Pneumatically-driven Quadruped Robot for Cheetah-like Locomotion
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Qian Zhao
  • Benjamin Ellenberger
  • Hidenobu Sumioka
  • Timothy Sandy
  • Rolf Pfeifer
Presentation Type paper
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Event Title 2013 International conference on Robotics and Biomimetics
Event Type conference
Event Location China
Event Start Date December 12 - 2013
Event End Date December 14 - 2013
Abstract Text Biological research has concluded that the actuation of the spine contributes significantly to the performance of quadrupeds in terms of controlling body posture, and integrating limbs and trunk actions. Inspired by this biological findings, we develop a pneumatically-driven quadruped robot called Renny with configurable spine morphology to study how the spine contributes to cheetah-like running. Three spine morphologies: rigid spine, passive spine, and actuated spine, are introduced and tested in Renny robot. In addition, we investigate the effect of the stiffness distribution of the spine muscles in the passive case. The experimental results show that the passive one where the dorsal stiffness is higher than the ventral stiffness can run faster, even faster than the rigid case. Moreover, the coordination between the legs and the actuated spine is studied in actuated spine morphology. We found that when the spinal movements are synchronized with the legs movements, the speed is much faster. In the actuated case, both flexion and extension benefit the increase of the speed by advancing limbs rapidly and increasing the limb swing.
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