• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.24 no.5 s.176
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• pp.1155-1165
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• 2000

Due to the irregularity of walking ground and the inaccuracy in trajectory control of a leg, the mechanical shock and slip on the ground can be caused in the landing and supporting legs of a walkin g robot, and the robot may lose walking stability. Especially in a jointed-leg type walking robot, those problems are much more severe than in the pantograph type since the leg-weight of the jointed-leg type walking robot is relatively heavier than that of the pantograph type in general. In order to secure the walking stability for the jointed-leg type quadrupedal robot under development in KIST(Korea Institute of Science and Technology), a balancing algorithm consisting of the leg compliance control and the body posture control is implemented in this paper, and the effectiveness of the algorithm is verified through experiments.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.21 no.8
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• pp.1250-1258
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• 1997

This paper reports on the development of a new foot for a quadrupedal jointed-leg type walking robot. The foot has 2 toes, one at the front and the other at the rear side, for stable landing on uneven ground by point contact. The toes can move up and down independantly, guided by double-wishbone shaped parallel links which enable the lower leg to rotate with respect to a remote center on the ground surface. The motion of each toe is damped by a hydropneumatic shock absorber integrated in the foot in order to absorb the dynamic landing shock. Furthermore, the new foot can reduce the maximum hip joint drive torque by shortening the moment arm length between the hip joint and the landing force vector on the ground. Intensive experiments were carried out in this study by using a one-leg walking model to investigate the soft landing performance of the foot which could be hardly offered by conventional robot feet such as a flat plate with a gimbal type ankle joint. And it was confirmed that the hip joint torque of the leg walking on the flat surface could be reduced remarkably by using the new foot.