Abstract
The legs and transmissions of walking robots need to fulfill dynamic and load-bearing movements while also enabling more applications by being resistant to challenging outdoor- and aquatic environments. Furthermore, the physical behaviour of the robot legs needs to be predictable throughout their service life to enable torque-dependent control. Therefore, weathering and wear of leg components must not alter the movement resistance in order to avoid frequent maintenance. Hence, we present a new leg design that obtains low inertia and fluid resistance by using four-bar linkages with compliant mechanisms of either stainless spring steel or super-elastic nickel-titanium. The leg mechanisms were tested to formulise their torque behaviour, axial deflections, and fatigue life in saltwater (\(\approx \)12% salinity). Conventional sealed stainless steel ball bearings were also tested to provide data references. Our experiments show that nickel-titanium outperform stainless spring steel with more predictable behaviour, less resistance, and longer fatigue life.
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Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Mathias Neerup for his support in developing the software to control the bench test and experiments. This work is supported by the Human Frontier Science Program under grant agreement no. RGP0002/2017.
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Billeschou, P., Do, C.D., Larsen, J.C., Manoonpong, P. (2022). A Compliant Leg Structure for Terrestrial and Aquatic Walking Robots. In: Chugo, D., Tokhi, M.O., Silva, M.F., Nakamura, T., Goher, K. (eds) Robotics for Sustainable Future. CLAWAR 2021. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 324. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86294-7_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86294-7_7
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