A new mechanical design for legged robots to reduce energy consumption

Many legged robots have been designed and built by universities, research institutes and industry; however, few investigations regard energy consumption as a crucial design criterion. This paper presents a novel configuration for legged robots to reduce the energy consumption. The proposed leg can be either used as a single leg or easily attached to bodies with four, six and eight legs. This mechanism is a parallel four-bar linkage equipped with one active and four passive joints. In fact, the usage of the passive elements leads to simple feed-forward control paradigms. Moreover, another distinctive feature of this design is the arrangement of one-way clutches and flat springs to store the potential energy for utilizing it in the next step. A locomotion prototype of the proposed mechanical structure is built and its simulation is also presented in this paper. Comparing the results with other structures demonstrates the superiority and efficiency of this work regarding energy consumption problem.