A Novel Design of Musculoskeletal Bipedal Robot Applied with Bio-Inspired Elastic Actuation

A rigid actuation method does not allow a humanoid to flexibly compliant with the efforts needed to be exerted in a changing environment. Thus, starting from the studies developed in the biomechanical and biomimetic fields, this paper introduces a novel bipedal robot equipped with a musculoskeletal-like mechanism, in order to obtain the expected compliant locomotion. The robot’s structure consists of extended elastic actuators built from SEAs (Series Elastic Actuators), in order to realize the muscle-tendons like artifact. A novel design of bipedal robot has been built scaling it to a kid-size dimension. An efficient simulation of the robot has also been implemented using the OpenSim Simulator. The kinematics and dynamics of our bipedal model are described in equations. Furthermore, the control architecture has been designed based on a Fuzzy Control and a PID Control approach. Some experiments both on the real and the simulated robot are presented to evaluate the robot’s design and its performances.