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Actuation & Control System for Energy-Efficient Walking Robots

Researchers at the Robotics Group at Sandia National Laboratories are developing energy efficient actuation and drive train technologies to dramatically improve the charge life of legged robots. The work is supported by DARPA, and Sandia will demonstrate an energy efficient bipedal robot at the technology exposition section of the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals in June, 2015. This video describes early development and initial integration of the Sandia Transmission Efficient Prototype Promoting Research (STEPPR) robot. It is a fully functional research platform that allows developers to try different joint-level mechanisms that function like elbows and knees to quantify how much energy is used. The key to the testing is Sandia's novel, energy-efficient actuators, which move the robots' joints. The actuation system uses efficient, brushless DC motors with very high torque-to-weight ratios, very efficient low-ratio transmissions and specially designed passive mechanisms customized for each joint to ensure energy efficiency.

Topics:
Automation Manufacturing & Prototyping Motion Control Motors & Drives Power Power Transmission Robotics Simulation Software Software Test & Measurement

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 I'm Steve Buerger with the robotics group at Sandia National Laboratories we call this project actuation and control system for efficient legged locomotion or excel our goal is to develop novel actuator systems that will make legged robots much more energy efficient in a state of the art we plan to demonstrate this in the technology expositions section of the DARPA Robotics Challenge

    00:00:22 in early June 2015 the sponsor of the work is DARPA our partners include the open source robotics foundation the florida institute for human and machine cognition MIT and globe motors with this video we're going to provide a glimpse into the process of developing a complex robotic system just like this one from the ground up so today we're in the midst of our build for our first

    00:00:46 generation robot first robot is not going to be super efficient but it's gonna let us test out some key drivetrain questions components some of the motors were using some of the rope and pulley transmissions were using so we have some likes testing going on right now on some of those transmission elements we have some pieces that are coming together some parts of the robot

    00:01:05 that we're sort of touching up polishing up getting fitted together we're gonna start putting the motors together we're gonna start assembling components to the robot at the same time we have simulations now of the robot modeled house is going to be and we have initial walking algorithms working so we're getting excited we're getting close to putting this thing together and starting

    00:01:22 to see if we can take a few steps the whole point in this project is to make energy efficient walking robots we're gonna be building two robots in the course of this project so we're working on a first robot now we have it fully mechanically assembled and we're starting to make some of the first movements so we're starting to do electronics integration and the first

    00:01:41 software to get the first joints moving so it's pretty exciting day get a chance to see the robot sort of moving for the very first time we have one leg kind of pulled up out of the way so we can exercise just the second leg right now we're just trying to sort of establish a baseline so sort of simple robotics practices efficient motors efficient transmissions see the best we can do

    00:02:03 one nice feature this that we've discovered we didn't really think even too much about it is it's very quiet because we have nice smooth control over the motors and we have some missions that are that are very efficient so if we can we'll take a step back and see if it's gonna move for us so right now we're just powering two joints two of the hip joints the other

    00:02:35 ones just along for the ride so everything the knee is doing in the ankles it's just floating for the moment so we have our first version electronics up on top so far everything's behaving just how we wanted to at the same time we sort of still have our R&D activities ongoing these will support the second robot so over here on the test and what we're trying to do is

    00:03:04 test some some interventions that will put at some of the joints that are specifically targeted to save energy and take advantage of the characteristics of walking so in this case we're looking at these big heavy duty Springs these will get loaded up so for instance at the ankle when you step the ankle can absorb a lot of energy stored in that spring and when you go to sort of tow back off

    00:03:25 that energy comes back out of the spring so we got this first set of robot legs fully assembled we've proved out our joint electronics and we're starting to make the robot move now all we got to do is get it standing and then walking then we got to design and build another robot get its standing get it walking really efficiently and then take it down to the demo and show it off to everybody so we

    00:03:50 got a lot of work ahead of us but we'll check in soon and see how it's coming along