LUCY, a Bipedal Walking Robot with Pneumatic Artificial Muscles

This paper describes the biped Lucy and it’s control architecture that will be used. Lucy is actuated by Pleated Pneumatic Artificial Muscles, which have a very high power to weight ratio and an inherent adaptable compliance. These characteristics will be used to make Lucy walk in a dynamically stable manner while exploiting the adaptable passive behavior of these muscles. The paper will focus briefly on the concept of the pleated pneumatic artificial muscle and antagonistic setup. The design and implementation of the pressure control unit will be discussed. A quasi-static global control has been implemented while using adapted PID techniques for the local feedback joint control. These initial control techniques resulted in the first movements of Lucy. This paper will discuss a future control architecture of Lucy to induce faster and smoother motion. The proposed control scheme is a combination of a global trajectory planner and a local low-level joint controller.