A Novel Approach to Touchdown Impact Damping for the Walking Robot Based on Low-Cost Geared Servo Drives

This paper proposes a novel approach to touchdown deceleration overload reduction, which is intended for the walking robot with pantograph kinematics of the legs. To reduce the robot price, developers widely use low-cost geared servo motors, which can be damaged after jump or fall with rigid touchdown. Due to the high gear ratio and low-end sensors servo drives are unable to damp such impacts using closed-loop control. The proposed approach makes it possible to prevent robot damage and rollover by predicting the touchdown point using distance sensor or mechanical switch mounted on a robot and adding appropriate feed-forward action to a servo drive set point. The key advantage of the introduced solution is low dependence on the number of robots legs and doesn’t require modifying either servo drives or any of robots mechanical parts. The efficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated and analyzed on the basis of computer simulation.