Abstract
This paper presents the design and control of a high-speed running bipedal robot, BRAVER. The robot, which weighs 8.6 kg and is 0.36 m tall, has six active degrees, all of which are driven by custom back-driveable modular actuators, which enable high-bandwidth force control and proprioceptive torque feedback. We present the details of the hardware design, including the actuator, leg, foot, and onboard control systems, as well as the locomotion controller design for high dynamic tasks and improving robustness. We have demonstrated the performance of BRAVER using a series of experiments, including multi-terrains walking, up and down 15\(^{\circ }\) slopes, pushing recovery, and running. The maximum running speed of BRAVER reaches 1.75 m/s.
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The datasets used or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
(In our project, the total power represented by P specifically refers to the power consumption of the system, including the power used for computation. During COT testing, we employed an external switching power supply capable of real-time current detection as the power source input for the system. Then the total power is computed by \(P = UI\), where U and I respectively represent the output voltage and output current of the switching power supply. The COT of BRAVER is computed by \(\textrm{COT}=\frac{\int _{\textrm{t}_1}^{\textrm{t}_2} \textrm{P}}{\textrm{mgd}}\), where t1 and t2 represent the initial and final moments respectively, and d represents the total displacement during this time interval)
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Acknowledgements
We would like to gratefully acknowledge Professor Yibin Li and Professor Xuewen Rong for their invaluable support of this project.
Funding
This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (91948201 and, 62003190) and the Open Research Projects of Zhejiang Lab (No. 2022NB0AB06).
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The manuscript was mainly written by ZZ, and GZ provided guidance in the process. WZ, TC, YL, XR, RS, and DQ provided crucial assistance for the actual robot experiment. QH and SM contributed essential opinions for the revision and polishing of the manuscript. All authors reviewed and approved of the manuscript.
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Zhu, Z., Zhu, W., Zhang, G. et al. Design and control of BRAVER: a bipedal robot actuated via proprioceptive electric motors. Auton Robot 47, 1229–1243 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-023-10117-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-023-10117-5