Realization of autonomous leg coordination walking with quadruped robot driven by pneumatic artificial muscle

Abstract

McKibben pneumatic actuator(MPA), that is one of the soft actuators, has various good features as an actuator for robots. However, in many cases, control of these robots is performed by trial and error since it also has complicated nonlinear characteristics. To overcome the problem, we focus on the TEGOTAE based control which is one of the autonomous distributed control. In this paper, we make a quadruped robot whose forelegs are replaced with passive wheels and hind legs are driven by three MPA and a spring. At first, we confirm that the developed robot can walk with feedforward control if an appropriate phase difference between right and left hind leg is chosen. Next, we confirm that the robot can walk with TEGOTAE based feedback control even with the inappropriate phase difference. Through these experiments, we verified that TEGOTAE based control can be adaptable to a walking robot driven by MPA.