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Adaptability of quadruped animals is not solely reached by brain control, but by the interaction between its body, environment, and control. Especially, morphology of the body is supposed to contribute largely to the adaptability. We have tried to understand quadrupedal locomotion by building a bio-inspired quadruped robot named “Pneupard”, which has a feline-like muscular-skeletal structure. In our...
Cyclical locomotion, such as walking, hopping and running, is known to be generated at the spinal cord, guiding human and animal strides over different gaits. Over the last years, many researchers concentrated their study on the origin of such signals, replicating them by either controlling joint angles or torques. In this work, we use a quadruped pneumatic robot to reproduce stable walking on a treadmill...
Recently, the tendon-driven mechanism with variable joint stiffness has received attention for use in the development of a humanoid robot operated in an uncertain environment with physical contact. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to control the position and joint stiffness of a tendon-driven manipulator independently, using dedicated actuators. This mechanism consists of two parts: a component...
In contrast to the high movement adaptability of quadruped animals in many environmental conditions, it is hard for conventional quadruped robots to operate in complex environment conditions. We investigate the adaptability of animals' musculo-skeletal systems, by building a bio-inspired quadruped robot named ”Pneupard” which duplicates a feline musculo-skeletal system. In this study, we built Pneupard's...
Although robotic locomotion have greatly advanced over the past years, the abyss that separates such locomotion from even the simplest animal locomotions prompt us to approach robotic locomotion taking cues from animals. The animal musculoskeletal structure, often ignored by roboticists due to its high redundancy and complexity, might hold the secret for self-stable locomotion observed in bipeds and...
In recent years, musculoskeletal robots are being intensively studied to exploit the advantages of biological musculoskeletal systems for robot developments. In these robots, it is very important to assure engineering, biomechanical, and anatomical plausibility at the same time. However, these requirements are often in contradiction. Especially, in the human's shoulder complex, mimicking the glenohumeral...
The human musculoskeletal system is supposed to play an important role in doing various static and dynamic tasks. From this standpoint, some musculoskeletal humanoid robots have been developed in recent years. However, existing musculoskeletal robots did not have upper body with several DOFs to balance their bodies statically or did not have enough power to perform dynamic tasks. We think the musculoskeletal...
This paper aims to clarify the mechanism of an infant's locomotive development from the viewpoint of cognitive developmental robotics. We built up an infant-sized musculoskeletal robot driven by McKibben pneumatic actuators, which enable the robot to interact with its environment without any problems of mechanical damage and excessive heat in long-term experiments. We applied a learning algorithm...
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