Download or read book Dynamic Stabilisation of the Biped Lucy Powered by Actuators with Controllable Stiffness written by Bram Vanderborght and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-10-04 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reports on the developments of the bipedal walking robot Lucy. Special about it is that the biped is not actuated with the classical electrical drives but with pleated pneumatic artificial muscles. In an antagonistic setup of such muscles both the torque and the compliance are controllable. From human walking there is evidence that joint compliance plays an important role in energy efficient walking and running. Moreover pneumatic artificial muscles have a high power to weight ratio and can be coupled directly without complex gearing mechanism, which can be beneficial towards legged mechanisms. Additionally, they have the capability of absorbing impact shocks and store and release motion energy. This book gives a complete description of Lucy: the hardware, the electronics and the software. A hybrid simulation program, combining the robot dynamics and muscle/valve thermodynamics, has been written to evaluate control strategies before implementing them in the real biped.