Legged walkers are a class of robots that imitate the locomotion of animals and insects, using legs. Legged robots have the potential to transverse rough terrains that are impassable by standard wheeled vehicles. It is with this in mind that robotics are developing walker robots. Imitation of Life Legged walkers may imitate the locomotion style of insects, crabs, and sometimes humans. Biped walkers are still a little rare, requiring balance and a good deal more engineering science than multilegged robots.…

In 1984 Valentino Braitenberg published a book titled Vehicles—Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. In his book Valentino describes a number of wondrous vehicles that exhibit interesting behaviors based on the use of a few electronic neurons Similar in concept to Walter’s seminal neural work with his robot tortoises, Valentino’s vehicle behavior is more straightforward, making it somewhat easier to follow both theoretically and logically. This also makes it easier to implement his ideas into real designs for robots. In this chapter we will build a few Braitenberg ­type vehicles. At the heart of Braitenberg vehicles is his description of a basic vehicle, which is a sensor connected to a motor.…

Task strategy Use of both position and force information is a unique feature in the…

Based on Mason’s Principle, a hybrid position/force control system can be constructed in such a…

A class of simple tasks may need only trajectory control where the robot end-effecter is…

In this section we will extend Lagrange’s equations of motion obtained for the two d.o.f.…

Lagrangian Dynamics In the Newton-Euler formulation, the equations of motion are derived from Newton's Second…

In this section, we interpret the physical meaning of each term involved in the closed…

In this chapter, we analyze the dynamic behavior of robot mechanisms. The dynamic behavior is…

We have found that the equivalent joint torques are related to the endpoint force by…