| Insects use their legs to easily traverse irregular terrain. In recent years, bioroboticists have studied insect locomotion in order to design more capable robots. The cricket was chosen for study because of its walking and jumping abilities. On the other hand, the cockroach front leg was modeled because of that animal's ability to climb over obstacles.; This work developed a dynamic simulation of a cricket to aid in the design of a cricket micororobot. Kinematic data were collected by recording the animal walking on a treadmill with high speed video recording at 250 frames per second. Each video frame was digitized to extract limb position data and the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) was used to filter out noise. These data were then converted into joint angles using geometric transformations. The dynamic model consists of a body with six legs, where each leg has three segments and five degrees of freedom. Proportional control caused the model's joints to follow the desired joint trajectories. The joint angle results show that some joints move little during walking, therefore the degrees of freedom in the model can be reduced to simplify the microrobot's design.; A front leg of Robot IV, a cockroach robot, was also modeled and controlled. The leg has three segments: coxa, femur, and tibia. The body-coxa joint, coxa-femur joint and femur-tibia joint have three, one and one degrees of freedom, respectively. The simulated leg is actuated with model McKibben artificial muscles, which are placed in antagonistic pairs at each degree of freedom. This model was developed to be used in the evolution of a continuous time recurrent neural networks (CTRNN). |
