Design and sensing of a flexible robot leg

Author

Lopes, Gabriel A. D. ; Fankai Zhang

Author_Institution

Delft Center for Syst. & Control, Delft Univ. of Technol., Delft, Netherlands

fYear

2013

fDate

3-7 Nov. 2013

Firstpage

4072

Lastpage

4077

Abstract

This paper reports on the work completed towards the design and sensing of a flexible robotic leg with applications to search and rescue and home robotics. Taking inspiration from the tentacles of cephalopods, we have designed and constructed a segmented leg that is driven by a single motor. The overall deformation of the segmented leg is achieved via tendons. Such a design enables the leg to be modular and mountable in any robotic platform that is driven by wheels or tracks. The deformation of the leg is measured in real-time using a fiber optic sensor that can be used for control purposes. We present experimental results for deformation sensing.

Keywords

deformation; design engineering; fibre optic sensors; legged locomotion; mechanical variables measurement; wheels; cephalopod tentacles; fiber optic sensor; flexible robot leg deformation sensing; flexible robot leg design; home robot; modular mountable leg; search and rescue robot; segmented leg construction; segmented leg deformation measurement; segmented leg design; tracks; wheels; Legged locomotion; Optical fiber sensors; Optical fibers; Tendons; Wheels;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on

Conference_Location

Tokyo

ISSN

2153-0858

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IROS.2013.6696939

Filename

6696939