Dynamic Stabilisation of the Biped Lucy Powered by Actuators with Controllable Stiffness

This book reports on the developments of the bipedal walking robot Lucy. Specialabout it is that the biped is not actuated with the classical electrical drives butwith pleated pneumatic artificial muscles. In an antagonistic setup of such musclesboth the torque and the compliance are controllable. From human walking there isevidence that joint compliance plays an important role in energy efficient walkingand running. Moreover pneumatic artificial muscles have a high power to weightratio and can be coupled directly without complex gearing mechanism, which canbe beneficial towards legged mechanisms. Additionally, they have the capability ofabsorbing impact shocks and store and release motion energy. This book gives acomplete description of Lucy: the hardware, the electronics and the software. Ahybrid simulation program, combining the robot dynamics and muscle/valve thermodynamics,has been written to evaluate control strategies before implementingthem in the real biped.