Modeling and Dynamic Locomotion of a Quadruped Robot with Spinal

The spine plays an important role in the high-speed gait of quadrupeds. In this paper, the Lagrange equation method is used to derive the local dynamics based on the parallel spine mechanism and the simplified overall dynamics of the spinal quadruped robot, then the mathematical models are verified in the simulation environment. Based on the dynamic analysis, the Model Predictive Control (MPC) is used to find the ground reaction force and the driving force of the spine, then joint torques of the quadruped robot are computed through force-position space mapping. Unlike existing spine type quadruped robots based on the principle of spring loaded inverted pendulum control (SLIP), the control framework proposed in this paper achieves accurate trajectory tracking. The control scheme achieved trot gait with a forward speed of 0.2m/s in the ADAMS simulation environment on the designed parallel spinal quadruped robot, accompanied by periodic movements of the body pitch and spinal extension and bending.