Dynamic Stabilisation of the Biped Lucy Powered by Actuators with Controllable Stiffness

The bipedal robot Lucy boasts breakthrough technology, using pleated pneumatic artificial muscles instead of the customary electrical drives. This book gives a complete description of Lucy's hardware, electronics and software and reports latest developments.

This book reports on the developments of the bipedal walking robot Lucy. Special about it is that the biped is not actuated with the classical electrical drives but with pleated pneumatic artificial muscles. In an antagonistic setup of such muscles both the torque and the compliance are controllable. From human walking there is evidence that joint compliance plays an important role in energy efficient walking and running. Moreover pneumatic artificial muscles have a high power to weight ratio and can be coupled directly without complex gearing mechanism, which can be beneficial towards legged mechanisms. Additionally, they have the capability of absorbing impact shocks and store and release motion energy. This book gives a complete description of Lucy: the hardware, the electronics and the software. A hybrid simulation program, combining the robot dynamics and muscle/valve thermodynamics, has been written to evaluate control strategies before implementing them in the real biped.

Reports recent research in bipedal walking exercised with the robot Lucy; the biped robot Lucy is introduced which is not actuated with the classical electrical drives but with pleated pneumatic artificial muscles State- of-the Art Book Written by leading experts in this field

Inhalt
Part1 Introduction.- Part2 Description of Lucy.- Part3Trajectory generator.- Part4 Trajectory tracking.- Part5 Compliance.- Part6 General conclusions and future work