engleski

Four-legged Walking Robot Actuated by Pneumatic Artificial Muscles

Mobile robotics is a multidisciplinary engineering field involving knowledge from many research areas, including mechanical and electrical technologies, electronic and software engineering, cognitive and social sciences. Therefore, mobile robotics is one of the most complex and most interesting engineering disciplines, because the people are especially fascinated by machines that can emulate certain human behaviors or devices that mimic natural systems. The system considered in this paper is a four-legged walking robot driven by pneumatic artificial muscles, called WRAPAM, developed in our laboratory to study the dynamic problems related with walking machines, wireless control of mobile systems and application of intelligent control for the robot orientation in an unknown environment with obstacles. Walking robots has added a new dimension as well as posed many new challenges in the mobile robot research because of the problems associated with legged locomotion and achieving system stability. It seems that pneumatic muscles have a great potential for the actuation of new types of robots and manipulators. Pneumatic muscles have a natural elasticity which makes them suitable for use in bionic systems, i.e. biologically inspired design of modern technical systems, applying the process of developing engineering products and devices by taking inspiration found in nature. The realized robot is a fully autonomous system, equipped with Bluetooth function and USB connection for communication with a microcontroller and uses a cell phone or tablet computer based remote control technology. The robot frame is made mainly using square aluminum tubing in order to reduce weight and also a number of hand-made components are machined. The construction of robotic system includes a power unit for supplying compressed air, then pneumatic muscles as actuators for driving the robot joints, control and electronic part of the system and measuring equipment. All components are mounted on the quadruped robot in such a way that maintains the center of gravity of the system. Testing has been performed on the robotic system for the different directions of motion and implementation of walking with the ability to avoid obstacles.

pneumatic muscle actuators, four-legged walking robot, bionic systems

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