Dynamic stability and control of a novel handspringing robot

Abstract In the field of mobile robotics, legged locomotion plays an essential role in transporting robots over various terrain types. A significant portion of research on legged robots has been focused on one-legged robots. In contrast with different types of locomotion of multi-legged robots, one-legged robots have only one type of motion, called hopping. Hopping motion, as a type of hybrid behavior, is generally comprised of flight and stance phases. Dynamic stabilizing of hopping motion provides a challenging control problem because of its nonlinear and hybrid behavior. The majority of one-legged hopping robots investigated so far are only capable of hopping with one side of their leg. In this paper, a one-legged handspringing robot is proposed as a novel one-legged hopping robot able to hop with both its springy sides. In handspringing motion, the robot is able to clear obstacles with greater height compared to the well-known hopping motion with the same initial condition. The proposed robot has only one rotary actuator and the slipping phase in the robot's real motion is considered in its modeling. PD controllers are applied to provide different stable limit cycles to control the robot's forward velocity.