Tensegrity Locomotion on Rough Terrain

Tensegrity Locomotion on Rough Terrain: A quasi-static approach

Tournois, G.A.

van der Weijde, J.O. (mentor)

Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering

Biomechanical Engineering

Mechanical Engineering, BioMechanical Design, BioRobotics

ME2590-32

2017-05-10

Tensegrity robots are researched for robotic locomotion, as they have remarkable properties which makes them well suited for physical interaction with unknown and unstructured environments. So far, locomotion on rough terrain has not been demonstrate, but only on flat and moderately hilly terrain. Moreover, research merely focuses on rolling and crawling, while from conventional robotics legged-designs and legged locomotion is researched to traverse rough terrain. Therefore in this thesis, as rough terrain is everywhere in real life scenarios, the goal is to achieve walking locomotion with a 4-legged tensegrity robot. To this end, a method is proposed for static stable walking locomotion, which is based on a set of task trajectories of the robots contact nodes and its center of mass. For tracking control of these trajectories with existing control techniques sequence of reference configurations are required. Hence, a tensegrity reference planning algorithm is derived that generates these sequences of feasible equilibrium reference configurations for quasi-static motion. These reference configurations can directly fed into existing control thereby complementing the field of tensegrity control perfectly. Numerical results from simulations indicate that the proposed reference planner performs well. Moreover, results demonstrate static stable walking with a four-legged tensegrity robot is feasible both on flat as rough terrain with obstacles up to a sixth of the robots height. Thus, the goal is achieved. To the authors knowledge, this research is the first to 1) show truly rough terrain locomotion, and 2) demonstrate that controlled walking locomotion with accurate node placement is feasible with a tensegrity robot.

Tensegrity robot
tensegrity locomotion
reference planning
differential geometry
static stable walking

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:751522f7-8697-411f-97bb-3079700db883

2020-04-30

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2017 Tournois, G.A.