Development of a walking machine: mechanical design and control problems

摘要

This paper describes: a novel design of the leg drive mechanism, hardware architecture and the leg control method for a walking machine being developed to study various walking gait strategies. The leg mechanism employs an inverse differential gear drive system providing large leg lift and swing sweep angle about a common pivotal point while being driven collectively by a pair of motors. The development platform consists of a pair of legs mounted adjacently to each other on a linear slide. A three-axis piezo transducer is mounted on the feet to measure the various vector forces in the legs during the support phase. The force sensing results are presented and discussed. Currently one small four-legged prototype and one hexapod are used for the tests of different gait patterns.