Hey! My name is Chris and I recently finished my masters at the University of Cape Town. I spent it in the Robotics Lab working on the mechanical design and control side of a number of legged robot projects.
With their combination of power and compliance, pneumatic actuators have great potential for enabling dynamic and agile behaviors in legged robots, but their complex dynam- ics impose control challenges that have hindered widespread use. In this paper, we describe the development of a tractable model and characterization procedure of an off-the-shelf double acting pneumatic cylinder controlled by on/off solenoid valves for use in trajectory optimization. With this we are able to generate motions which incorporate both the body and actuator dynamics of our robot Kemba: a novel quadrupedal robot prototype with a combination of electric and pneumatic actu- ators. We demonstrate both a 0.5 m jump and land maneuver, and a maximal 1m jump, approximately 2.2 times its leg length, on the physical hardware with the proposed model and approach. The hardware matches the desired trajectory with a maximum height error of only 5cm without any feedback on the pneumatic joints, demonstrating the utility of the model in high-level motion generation, and capability of the physical robot.
@inproceedings{mailer2023,author={Mailer, Christopher and Shield, Stacey and Govender, Reuben and Patel, Amir},booktitle={2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},title={Getting Air: Modelling and Control of a Hybrid Pneumatic-Electric Legged Robot},year={2023},location={London, UK},volume={},number={},pages={9973-9979},url={https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10160737},doi={10.1109/ICRA48891.2023.10160737},}
Best way to reach me is through Email or LinkedIn.
