Abstract
While it is common to build robotic limbs with multiple degrees of freedom (DoF) inspired by nature, single DoF design remains fundamental, providing benefits including, but not limited to, simplicity, robustness, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency. Mechanisms, especially those with multiple links and revolute joints connected in closed loops, play an enabling factor in introducing motion diversity for 1-DoF systems, which are usually constrained by self-collision during a full-cycle range of motion. This study presents a novel computational approach to designing 1-DoF overconstrained robotic limbs for desired spatial trajectory while achieving energy-efficient, self-collision-free motion in full-cycle rotations. Firstly, we present the geometric optimization problem of linkage-based robotic limbs in a generalized formulation for self-collision-free design. Next, we formulate the spatial trajectory generation problem with the overconstrained linkages by optimizing the similarity and dynamic-related metrics. We further optimize the geometric shape of the overconstrained linkage to ensure smooth and collision-free motion driven by a single actuator. We validated our proposed method through various experiments, including personalized automata and bio-inspired hexapod robots. The resulting hexapod robot with overconstrained robotic limbs showed outstanding energy efficiency in forward walking.
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BibTeX (Download)
@online{Gu2024OCLimbDesign,
title = {One-DoF Robotic Design of Overconstrained Limbs with Energy-Efficient, Self-Collision-Free Motion},
author = {Yuping Gu and Bangchao Huang and Haoran Sun and Ronghan Xu and Jiayi Yin and Wei Zhang and Fang Wan and Jia Pan and Chaoyang Song},
year = {2024},
date = {2024-10-27},
abstract = {While it is common to build robotic limbs with multiple degrees of freedom (DoF) inspired by nature, single DoF design remains fundamental, providing benefits including, but not limited to, simplicity, robustness, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency. Mechanisms, especially those with multiple links and revolute joints connected in closed loops, play an enabling factor in introducing motion diversity for 1-DoF systems, which are usually constrained by self-collision during a full-cycle range of motion. This study presents a novel computational approach to designing 1-DoF overconstrained robotic limbs for desired spatial trajectory while achieving energy-efficient, self-collision-free motion in full-cycle rotations. Firstly, we present the geometric optimization problem of linkage-based robotic limbs in a generalized formulation for self-collision-free design. Next, we formulate the spatial trajectory generation problem with the overconstrained linkages by optimizing the similarity and dynamic-related metrics. We further optimize the geometric shape of the overconstrained linkage to ensure smooth and collision-free motion driven by a single actuator. We validated our proposed method through various experiments, including personalized automata and bio-inspired hexapod robots. The resulting hexapod robot with overconstrained robotic limbs showed outstanding energy efficiency in forward walking.},
note = {Submitted to Fundamental Research},
keywords = {Corresponding Author, Under Review},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
tppubtype = {online}
}
