Tunable Dynamic Walking via Soft Twisted Beam Vibration

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method for controlling soft twisted beams to generate tunable walking gaits in robots, leveraging vibration propagation and anisotropic stiffness for simplified actuation.

Contribution

It presents a novel mechanism using soft twisted beams with controllable stiffness to produce diverse walking trajectories from vibrational input.

Findings

Vibration propagation in twisted beams can be controlled to generate complex trajectories.

Ground contact influences the dynamic behavior of the system.

A single vibrational input can produce a tunable walking gait.

Abstract

We propose a novel mechanism that propagates vibration through soft twisted beams, taking advantage of dynamically-coupled anisotropic stiffness to simplify the actuation of walking robots. Using dynamic simulation and experimental approaches, we show that the coupled stiffness of twisted beams with terrain contact can be controlled to generate a variety of complex trajectories by changing the frequency of the input signal. This work reveals how ground contact influences the system's dynamic behavior, supporting the design of walking robots inspired by this phenomenon. We also show that the proposed twisted beam produces a tunable walking gait from a single vibrational input.