Analysis of Stiffness and Energy Consumption of Nonlinear Elastic Joint Legged Robot

Abstract

In order to reduce the energy consumption of the legged robot in walking, this paper designs a kind of nonlinear elastic joint from the flexible variable-stiffness joint based on the mammal walking on the limb and optimizes the leg structure of the legged robot. The motor is rigidly connected to the articulated lever. When the lever is accelerated or decelerated, the elastic unit is introduced. The system can be considered as a special variable-rate elastic system. This paper will study it from theory and simulation experiments. Based on the dynamic analysis, a functional relationship between the output torque and the torsion spring stiffness and between the energy consumption and the torsion spring stiffness was established. By finding the extremum, the two optimum torsional spring stiffness that can minimize the required output average torque and the energy consumed during one cycle of motion were deduced. The results show that using this design in a reasonable position can effectively reduce the energy consumption of the system and can achieve up to a 50% reduction in energy consumption.