Development of a biped balloon walking robot with lightweight mechanism and simple ON/OFF controls

Recently, the declining birth rate and growing proportion of elderly people, an insufficient number of caregivers, have become serious issues in Japan. To address these problems, biped walking robots have been proposed, which have high affinity toward humans. This study presents the development of a balloon walking robot that uses buoyancy to offset the effect of gravity. The author believes we can ensure the safety of robots by analyzing the psychological effects on humans via a balloon walking robot. The proposed robot has flexible legs and a compact and lightweight (total weight of 5.9 g) drive due to the use of shape memory alloys (SMAs). The legs have two degrees of freedom and are controlled by simply switching the ON/OFF current signals to the SMA-based V-type-flexible flat plate actuator. The balloon walking robot stays upright due to a balance between the leg mechanism and helium. In walking experiments, we tested static walking to acquire basic data for the next model. These experiments verified the feasibility of the mechanism.