Christopher Mailer

2023

1. 

   Getting Air: Modelling and Control of a Hybrid Pneumatic-Electric Legged Robot

   Christopher Mailer, Stacey Shield, Reuben Govender, and Amir Patel

   In 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023

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   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},
   }