Preliminary Experiment of Backstroke by the Swimming Humanoid Robot

抄録

The swimming humanoid robot called SWUMANOID was developed as an experimental platform for swimming research. The robot has 24 actuators to realize the swimming motion. To date, the front crawl, the breaststroke, and the butterfly stroke have been realized by this robot. In this study, the preliminary motion of backstroke was created and realized by the robot to examine the robot performance in the backstroke regarding the swimming speed and the swimming direction. The backstroke motion was created based on the human swimming. The motion of the robot was modified due to the insufficient degrees-of-freedom to realize the motion entirely. The motion was studied in the simulation, and the result was validated by the experiment. In the experiment, with the stroke cycle 2.3 s, the robot could swim straight at the swimming speed of 0.26 m/s.