Variable stiffness control of series elastic actuated biped locomotion

Decoupled robust backstepping tracking control for variable stiffness actuated robot with input saturation

Due to the energy storage and release capability introduced by stiffness adjustment, a variable stiffness actuator is essential to achieve human-like energy efficiency for robots. However, it is not trivial to control the strongly coupled and nonlinear system, especially with highly dynamic stiffness variation. In this work, decoupled and robust command filtered backstepping tracking controllers for position and stiffness are proposed. Furthermore, a disturbance observer is introduced to estimate the lumped disturbances caused by directly decoupled dynamics and unmodeling errors. Since the input control torques can be easily saturated due to limited deformation of elastic elements, anti-windup compensation is introduced into the tracking control laws to reduce its negative influence. Thus, by combining the command filtered backstepping controller, disturbance observers, and anti-windup compensation, the stability proof of the proposed composite controller is provided. The tracking control performance is validated through simulations of multi-DoF variable stiffness actuated robots.

Lunar Surface Fault-Tolerant Soft-Landing Performance and Experiment for a Six-Legged Movable Repetitive Lander

The cascading launch and cooperative work of lander and rover are the pivotal methods to achieve lunar zero-distance exploration. The separated design results in a heavy system mass that requires more launching costs and a limited exploration area that is restricted to the vicinity of the immovable lander. To solve this problem, we have designed a six-legged movable repetitive lander, called "HexaMRL", which congenitally integrates the function of both the lander and rover. However, achieving a buffered landing after a failure of the integrated drive units (IDUs) in the harsh lunar environment is a great challenge. In this paper, we systematically analyze the fault-tolerant capacity of all possible landing configurations in which the number of remaining normal legs is more than two and design the landing algorithm to finish a fault-tolerant soft-landing for the stable configuration. A quasi-incentre stability optimization method is further proposed to increase the stability margin during supporting operations after landing. To verify the fault-tolerant landing performance on the moon, a series of experiments, including five-legged, four-legged and three-legged soft-landings with a vertical landing velocity of -1.9 m/s and a payload of 140 kg, are successfully carried out on a 5-DoF lunar gravity ground-testing platform. The HexaMRL with fault-tolerant landing capacity will greatly promote the development of a next-generation lunar prober.

Allowing the Load to Swing Reduces the Mechanical Energy of the Stance Leg and Improves the Lateral Stability of Human Walking

Loaded walking with typical rigid backpack results in a significant increase in the mechanical energy of the stance leg and a decrease in lateral stability. Allowing the load to swing, which has been applied in shoulder pole, a tool widely used in Asia for load carriage assistance, may attenuate these effects. This paper theoretically analyzes and experimentally validates the biomechanical and energetic effects of the swinging loads. When walking with a 30 kg load, allowing the load to swing reduces the fore-aft leg impulses by over 19% and further reduces the mechanical energy of the stance leg by 12.9% compared to the typical rigid backpack. The whole-body metabolic cost has no significant change, which may be attributed to the increase in the muscle work of the upper body and the leg swing. Moreover, the load movement out of phase to the human in the lateral direction reduces the lateral excursion of extrapolated center-of-mass by 27.2%, indicating an increase in the lateral margin of stability and implying an improvement in lateral stability. The results demonstrate that allowing the load to swing reduces the horizontal leg impulses and the mechanical energy of the stance leg, and improves the lateral stability of human walking.

Analysis of Stiffness and Energy Consumption of Nonlinear Elastic Joint Legged Robot

In order to reduce the energy consumption of the legged robot in walking, this paper designs a kind of nonlinear elastic joint from the flexible variable-stiffness joint based on the mammal walking on the limb and optimizes the leg structure of the legged robot. The motor is rigidly connected to the articulated lever. When the lever is accelerated or decelerated, the elastic unit is introduced. The system can be considered as a special variable-rate elastic system. This paper will study it from theory and simulation experiments. Based on the dynamic analysis, a functional relationship between the output torque and the torsion spring stiffness and between the energy consumption and the torsion spring stiffness was established. By finding the extremum, the two optimum torsional spring stiffness that can minimize the required output average torque and the energy consumed during one cycle of motion were deduced. The results show that using this design in a reasonable position can effectively reduce the energy consumption of the system and can achieve up to a 50% reduction in energy consumption.

Robust Bipedal Locomotion Based on a Hierarchical Control Structure

To improve biped locomotion’s robustness to internal and external disturbances, this study proposes a hierarchical structure with three control levels. At the high level, a foothold sequence is generated so that the Center of Mass (CoM) trajectory tracks a planned path. The planning procedure is simplified by selecting the midpoint between two consecutive Center of Pressure (CoP) points as the feature point. At the middle level, a novel robust hybrid controller is devised to drive perturbed system states back to the nominal trajectory within finite cycles without chattering. The novelty lies in that the hybrid controller is not subject to linear CoM dynamic constraints. The hybrid controller consists of two sub-controllers: an oscillation controller and a smoothing controller. For the oscillation controller, the desired CoM height is specified as a sine-shaped function, avoiding a new attractive limit cycle. However, this controller results in the inevitable chattering because of discontinuities. A smoothing controller provides continuous properties and thus can inhibit the chattering problem, but has a smaller region of attraction compared with the oscillation controller. A hybrid controller merges the two controllers for a smooth transition. At the low level, the desired CoM motion is defined as tasks and embedded in a whole body operational space (WBOS) controller to compute the joint torques analytically. The novelty of the low-level controller lies in that within the WBOS framework, CoM motion is not subject to fixed CoM dynamics and thus can be generalized.