Design and control of a pneumatic quadrupedal walking robot

The mechanical and electronics design of a quadrupedal walking robot featuring 12 pneumatically actuated degrees of freedom is presented. Control of the robot's joint motions incorporates open-loop damping into the actuation and uses a stance/swing gain scheduler in the joint position controller. The inclusion of these two attributes enables stable and robust joint-level control while attenuating the undesirable oscillatory modes that are commonly associated with pneumatically actuated walking robots. Joint motion trajectories that permit stable walking are developed and implemented in the robot. The combination of these features and techniques is experimentally shown to enable stable walking locomotion of the robot that is not inhibited by unwanted oscillations of significant magnitude.