Research Of Locust Jumping Robot

With the increasing range of robotic applications, they are facing more and more complicated working environments, in which the robots are expected to have stronger moveable ability and terrain adaptability. The jumping behaviors of locust features the characteristics such as jumping fast, long distance, low energy consumption, low requirements on the ground environments, and moving steadily. Particularly, it is suitable for locomotion in a complex and even hostile circumstance. With the locust taken as a prototype, the paper designed a bionic locust jumping robot. The main contents of this paper are as follows:First, the bionic locust jumping robot is designed based on the bionics principles. The biological characteristics and jumping mechanisms of locust are analyzed briefly. The bionic locust jumping robot is designed by properly simplifying the complex joint structures of locust, which is composed of a multi-linkage mechanism and driven by cylinders.Second, the kinematic model of bionic locust jumping robot is built using DH method. The expression of posture and center of mass is conducted. The differential motion relation of the center of mass of bionic locust jumping robot and the variation of joint angles is established. The change rule of joint angles in the take-off stage is obtained by fitting the data of the locust jumping. The curves of velocity and acceleration of bionic locust jumping robot in the take-off stage is then obtained by simulation. The feasibility of the bionic design of the jumping robot is verified.Third, the dynamics model of bionic locust jumping robot is built. The driving force of the bionic locust jumping robot is provided by cylinders. The cylinder model is simplified based on its operating principle, and the Lagrange’s dynamical equations are established. The joint torque variations in the take-off stage is conducted on the basis of the above kinematics analysis, and the torque variations without flexible joints is then obtained. The optimization of joints torque by cylinders is verified by comparing the curves of these two kinds.Last, the posture optimization of bionic locust jumping robot in take-off stage is studied according to the above kinematic and dynamics analyses. The jumping height and distance of the jumping robot is affected by its postures in the take-off stage. In order to optimize the postures of jumping robot, the velocity manipulability and force manipulability are computed, which are used as the measures of jumping robot’s performance. The optimization of postures is converted into finding an optimal solution for a nonlinear objective function. The maximums of velocity manipulability and force manipulability in task directions are achieved by Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm, and the jumping robot’s joint angle values in take-off stage are also obtained.