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Effects of head and tail as swinging appendages on the dynamic walking performance of a quadruped robot

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2016

Xiuli Zhang ,
Jiaqing Gong  and
Yanan Yao
Xiuli Zhang*
Affiliation:
School of Mechanical, Electronic and Control Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
Jiaqing Gong
Affiliation:
School of Mechanical, Electronic and Control Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
Yanan Yao
Affiliation:
School of Mechanical, Electronic and Control Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: zhangxl@bjtu.edu.cn
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Summary

We designed a quadruped robot with a one-degree-of-freedom (1-DOF)-pitch head, a 1-DOF-roll tail, and 14 active DOFs in total, which are controlled via a central pattern generator (CPG) based on a Hopf oscillator. Head and tail movements are coupled to the leg movements with fixed phase differences. Experiments show that tail swinging in roll can equilibrate feet–ground reaction forces (GRF), reducing yaw errors and enabling the robot to maintain its direction when trotting. Head swing in pitch has the potential to increase flight time and stride length of the swinging legs and increase the robot's forward velocity when running in bounds.

Keywords

Quadruped robotSwinging appendageRhythmic motionBiologically inspiredCentral pattern generator
Type
Articles
Information
Robotica , Volume 34 , Issue 12 , December 2016 , pp. 2878 - 2891
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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