Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, United States of America.
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, United States of America.
Bioinspir Biomim. 2023 Sep 19;18(6). doi: 10.1088/1748-3190/acf824.
Small jumping robots can use springs to maximize jump performance, but they are typically not able to control the height of each jump owing to design constraints. This study explores the use of the jumper's latch, the component that mediates the release of energy stored in the spring, as a tool for controlling jumps. A reduced-order model that considers the dynamics of the actuator pulling the latch and the effect of spring force on the latch is presented. This model is then validated using high speed video and ground reaction force measurements from a 4jumper. Both the model and experimental results demonstrate that jump performance in small insect-inspired resource-constrained robots can be tuned to a range of outputs using latch mediation, despite starting with a fixed spring potential energy. For a fixed set of input voltages to the latch actuator, the results also show that a jumper with a larger latch radius has greater tunability. However, this greater tunability comes with a trade-off in maximum performance. Finally, we define a new metric, 'Tunability Range,' to capture the range of controllable jump behaviors that a jumper with a fixed spring compression can attain given a set of control inputs (i.e. latch actuation voltage) to choose from.
小型跳跃机器人可以使用弹簧来最大化跳跃性能，但由于设计限制，它们通常无法控制每次跳跃的高度。本研究探索了使用跳跃器的闩锁作为控制跳跃的工具，闩锁是调节弹簧储存能量释放的部件。提出了一个考虑致动器拉动闩锁的动力学和弹簧力对闩锁影响的降阶模型。然后使用高速视频和来自 4 个跳跃器的地面反作用力测量对该模型进行验证。模型和实验结果都表明，尽管起始弹簧势能是固定的，但使用闩锁调节可以将小型昆虫启发的资源受限机器人的跳跃性能调整到一系列输出。对于闩锁致动器的固定输入电压集，结果还表明，具有较大闩锁半径的跳跃器具有更大的可调性。然而，这种更大的可调性需要在最大性能方面做出权衡。最后，我们定义了一个新的度量标准，“可调范围”，以捕获给定一组控制输入（即闩锁致动电压）可以选择的情况下，具有固定弹簧压缩的跳跃器可以达到的可控制跳跃行为的范围。
