Neural Rehabilitation Group (NRG), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Madrid, Spain.
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
Bioinspir Biomim. 2022 Oct 13;17(6). doi: 10.1088/1748-3190/ac92b3.
Legged robotic technologies have moved out of the lab to operate in real environments, characterized by a wide variety of unpredictable irregularities and disturbances, all this in close proximity with humans. Demonstrating the ability of current robots to move robustly and reliably in these conditions is becoming essential to prove their safe operation. Here, we report an in-depth literature review aimed at verifying the existence of common or agreed protocols and metrics to test the performance of legged system in realistic environments. We primarily focused on three types of robotic technologies, i.e., hexapods, quadrupeds and bipeds. We also included a comprehensive overview on human locomotion studies, being it often considered the gold standard for performance, and one of the most important sources of bioinspiration for legged machines. We discovered that very few papers have rigorously studied robotic locomotion under irregular terrain conditions. On the contrary, numerous studies have addressed this problem on human gait, being nonetheless of highly heterogeneous nature in terms of experimental design. This lack of agreed methodology makes it challenging for the community to properly assess, compare and predict the performance of existing legged systems in real environments. On the one hand, this work provides a library of methods, metrics and experimental protocols, with a critical analysis on the limitations of the current approaches and future promising directions. On the other hand, it demonstrates the existence of an important lack of benchmarks in the literature, and the possibility of bridging different disciplines, e.g., the human and robotic, towards the definition of standardized procedures that will boost not only the scientific development of better bioinspired solutions, but also their market uptake.
腿式机器人技术已经走出实验室，在真实环境中运行，这些环境具有广泛的不可预测的不规则性和干扰，而且与人类非常接近。证明当前机器人在这些条件下能够稳健可靠地移动对于证明其安全运行至关重要。在这里，我们报告了一项深入的文献综述，旨在验证是否存在通用或商定的协议和指标来测试腿式系统在现实环境中的性能。我们主要关注三种类型的机器人技术，即六足机器人、四足机器人和双足机器人。我们还对人类运动研究进行了全面概述，因为它通常被认为是性能的黄金标准，也是腿式机器人生物启发的最重要来源之一。我们发现，很少有论文严格研究了不规则地形条件下的机器人运动。相反，许多研究已经解决了人类步态的这个问题，尽管在实验设计方面具有高度的异质性。这种缺乏一致方法的情况使得社区难以正确评估、比较和预测现有腿式系统在真实环境中的性能。一方面，这项工作提供了一个方法、指标和实验协议库，并对当前方法的局限性和未来有前途的方向进行了批判性分析。另一方面，它表明文献中存在重要的基准缺失，并且有可能弥合不同学科之间的差距，例如人类和机器人，以定义标准化程序，这不仅将促进更好的仿生解决方案的科学发展，还将促进其市场接受度。
