Motion control for an underactuated brachiation robot based on Lyapunov direct method

Abstract

Abstract This paper studies a control strategy to drive a brachiation robot to realize the movement from an arbitrary initial posture to the desired target position imitating a gibbon to move from branch to branch. The main control aim is to drive an underactuated 2-DOF brachiation robot to reach the target in two action modes of swing motion and locomotion motion. Then, a brachiation motion controller is designed to consist of two control processes in which one is used to drive the brachiation robot to move from the suspend posture to the target position via a Lyapunov method, and the other is to ensure that the end of the link of the robot can reach the target bar through direction feedback control. Finally, some experimental results show that the control method can succeed to control a brachiation robot to achieve successfully the movement from one bar to another adjacent bar in two different cases.