Jumping Mini-Robot with Bio-Inspired Legs

This paper presents a bio-inspired concept for an autonomous centimeter-scale robot for locomotion on un-even terrains with bionic legs. Our previous work, the jumping robot "GRILLO I" (Fig. 1A), is firstly introduced, as well as its limitations. For improving the performance of this prototype, we made biological observations on jumping insects by means of a high speed camera. It was found that the legs configuration let map muscle-like force into a constant force at feet-ground interface, which represents an optimum design for jumping. That gives us the bionic inspiration to redesign the legs that can reproduce the dynamic characteristics of insect jumping. Based on this idea, a new jumping robot prototype, GRILLO II (Fig. 1B), is then presented, as well as jumping details measured by the high speed camera and accelerometer.