Dynamic Stabilisation of the Biped Lucy Powered by Actuators with Controllable Stiffness

This dissertation 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 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 manuscript 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.