Mechanism Design and Performance Analysis of Bionic Quadruped Robot With Spine

In this paper, the mechanical structure of a bionic quadruped robot with a spine is designed and the corresponding performances of different spines are analyzed. Firstly, the mechanisms of leg and spine are designed. And then the kinematics analysis of the leg mechanism is carried out by listing the closed-loop vector of the mechanism using the integral method. Secondly, taking the planning trajectory based on the Bezier curve as the target trajectory of foot end effector, 12 parameters of leg mechanism are optimized to make the error between target and optimized trajectory as small as possible. Finally, a simplified simulation model of quadruped robot is established in ADAMS software, and the performances of the quadruped robot with pure rigid, rigid-flexible coupled passive spine and active spine are compared and analyzed. Comparative simulation shows that the application of rigid-flexible coupled spine could improve the motion speed and reduce the impact force of foot end effector efficiently. This research provides an insight for the locomotion control of legged robots.