Proceedings of the 1995 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. Part 2 (of 5), Vancouver, Canada, 22 - 25 October 1995, vol.2, pp.1303-1308, (Full Text)
The aim of this paper is to show the evolution of our legged robot project and to present our new tested architecture. The reasons why we have built an hybrid robot composed of wheels and legs are given and its behaviour commented. First, we recall the actuated leg model based on one hand on a thermodynamic study according to pneumatic actuators and on the other hand on the dynamic model for the mechanic part. The non linear controller which ensures good tracking at high velocities is presented. Experiments lead to a new trajectory planning. Moreover, the structure suggests important remarks concerning legged robot design especially according to interaction effects between legs during a complete gait cycle. According to these results, we propose a general decentralized architecture with a coordinator level to ensure a good behaviour of the platform.