脚に生じる水平方向の弾性力を推進に活かした多脚ロボット

抄録

Legs’ stiffness design for legged robots is essential to improve the locomotion performance, e.g., efficiency and speed of robots, which many researchers have conducted. The pioneering work, done by Galloway et al., mainly focuses on the stiffness against ‘vertical forces’ such as gravity. This paper focuses on the legs’ stiffness against the friction force, which is ‘horizontal’ to the ground, named the leg’s horizontal stiffness. We fabricate the prototype that can change the horizontal stiffness of its legs by utilizing Living Hinges. The experiment results demonstrate that mobility performance is improved by tuning the legs’ horizontal stiffness appropriately. The results shed new light on a legged robot’s design method to increase the robot’s locomotion speed.