Design of a kangaroo robot with dynamic jogging locomotion

Abstract

Based on the inspiration of the kangaroo's locomotion, we report on the development of a kangaroo robot with dynamic locomotion. Not like bipeds, quadrupeds, or hexapods which use multi legs for locomotion, the kangaroo usually moves two legs in phase, which resides in a very unique class of locomotion as the monopod. Though special, the research about its continuous forward locomotion is very limited. In this work, the center of mass locomotion of the robot is designed to move according to the spring loaded inverted pendulum (SLIP) with rolling contact, based on the fact that the SLIP is widely used as the model for legged animal's dynamic locomotion. To compensate the possible body pitch variation, the robot is equipped with an active tail for pitch variation compensation, like the kangaroo does. The robot is empirically built, and various design issues and strategies are addressed. Finally, the experimental evaluation is executed to validate the performance of the design of the robot with dynamic locomotion.