Browsing by Author "Van Der Leek, Casey"

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    Kinematic Modeling and Dynamic Aspects of an Accelerating Quadruped
    (2024) Van Der Leek, Casey; Nicolls, Frederick
    Bio-inspired robotics engineers look to the natural world for clues to aspects of motion dynamics and morphologies that may be incorporated in the design of these robots. The mimicking and transfer of these aspects of a live subject to a modern day robot is limited by the technologies available such as computational resources, materials engineering, mathematical modeling constraints and efficient systems engineering. With this in mind, a reasonable strategy is to reproduce the functionality of a subject with current technology. A monocular camera and deep learning algorithm allow non-invasive image pose extraction of an accelerating cheetah subject, which is represented as a mechanism of rigid links interconnected by joints, and this information forms the data basis of subsequent operations. In addition, a non-linear least squares optimiser is formulated and coded specifically for the quadruped robot that produces estimates of the relative link angles, a base link length and trajectory of a reference point so that a three dimensional configuration evolution of the system is rendered. A secondary consideration is the deployment of inverse kinematics to determine the end effector trajectory of the front leg, both in the real spatial frames and phase space domains, as well as the angular rates required for these target manifolds. The parameterised inverse kinematics models were also able to generate smooth task space trajectories to within acceptable tolerances of the target position and for a single, full gait the corresponding joint space trajectories were deemed to be sufficiently closed.