Structural design and jumping motion planning of the jumping leg inspired by a goat's hindlimb

Abstract

At present, research on bionic jumping robots mainly focuses on imitating various jumping animals, such as kangaroos, frogs, or locusts. These bionic objects have good jumping ability. The goat, as one of these with a moderate size and a strong jumping ability, is very suitable as a prototype to imitate jumping. In this study, first, a simplified serial joint model that imitates a goat's hindlimb is proposed with a comparison analysis of its physiological structure. Then, a jumping leg mechanism that imitates a goat's hindlimb was designed. Second, the kinematics of the goat-inspired jumping leg were constructed to describe the relationship between joint angles and foot positions. Additionally, we used a cubic polynomial to plan the trajectory of the jumping process to achieve a smooth jumping movement based on the characteristics of the goat's jumping, with position and speed constraints during the jump. Thus, we established a smooth jumping trajectory model of the goat-inspired jumping leg. Finally, experiments on the jumping of the goat-inspired jumping leg were conducted. The goat-inspired jumping leg has good jumping performance. In this study, we took the goat's hindlimbs as the bionic model, proposed the goat-inspired jumping leg mechanism, and presented the jumping trajectory planning theory for smooth jumping of the goat-inspired jumping leg. These provide new ideas for the study of bionic jumping legs and can effectively promote further development of bionic jumping robots.