Design, construction, and testing of a prototype robotic leg for controls experiments

The complex underactuated legs used in the FastRunner robot, designed by the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, are designed with multiple linkages and nonlinear springs to exploit the natural dynamics of the system in order to achieve extraordinary agility and efficiency. One way to control such a complex, underactuated system is to use a model-based control design approach based on robust nonlinear control. To develop a platform to test this physics based control design on the FastRunner leg, a free swinging underactuated robot leg was designed and constructed for benchtop controls experiments. A stand with motor to actuate the leg and a basic control system for the bench-top setup were also designed and implemented. To verify the performance of the leg, actuation, and the control setup, an open-loop step response, sinusoidal response, and chirp response were executed on the prototype leg setup. Future work includes redesign of the system electronics, construction of a system of equations that describes the leg, and completion of system identification.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Countouris, Paula Marie

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Russell L. Tedrake.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/74432

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/74432