Multi-Locomotion Robotic Systems – New Concepts of Bio-inspired Robotics Springer Tracks in Advanced Robotics

Article Type: Book reviews From: Industrial Robot: An International Journal, Volume 40, Issue 3

Toshio Fukuda, Yasuhisa Hasegawa, Kosuke Sekiyama and Tadayoshi AoyamaSpringer2012314 pp.$137ISBN: 978-3-642-30135-3www.springer.com/engineering/robotics/book/978-3-642-30134-6

Biologically inspired robotics is an area receiving increasing attention in recent years. Several robots have been developed, or are under development,which try to mimic some biological creature’s properties.

According to the author’s opinion, in order to realize a life-supporting robot in the near future, it is necessary for robots to ambulate autonomously in various types of man-made environments. These future robots should be able to implement different types of biological inspired forms of locomotion and to autonomously change among them according to the characteristics of the environment.

This book is an important contribution to this area, namely in what concerns distinct forms of robotic legged locomotion. The authors present here an integrated view of their work on multi-locomotion during the last years, which has been previously presented at international conferences and published in international journals. The focus of the presented work is in biped and quadruped locomotion, brachiation and ladder climbing.

Although it presents ten chapters, the book can be roughly divided in five main parts. The first part consists of a good review of the state-of-the-art on biologically inspired concepts, mainly on robotic locomotion and “control”theories; the detailed presentation of the “multi-locomotion robot”concept introduced by the authors, along with some basic aspects of robots’trajectory generation methods and limit cycles. In this introductory part, the passive dynamic autonomous control (PDAC) is presented and it consists of a control method introduced by the authors and is based on point-contact and virtual holonomic constraints, with its advantages also noted.

The second part of the book, Chapter 3, is the hardware description of the several multi-locomotion robots developed in the author’s laboratory, being detailed the “Brachiator” and “Gorilla” series of robots.

The next part, the third, deals with the implementation of distinct forms of locomotion in the robots presented. This part starts with the implementation of brachiation, first in a regular horizontal ladder (with equal spaced intervals),followed by a smooth, continuous brachiation and, finally a continuous brachiation in an irregular horizontal ladder. Then the implementation of the quadruped crawl gait is presented and later, the vertical ladder climbing motion(in which the performance of the transverse, pace and trot gaits are evaluated).

Part four begins with the design of strategies for allowing the robot to transition from ladder climbing to brachiation motions, and later introduces the locomotion transition based on the walking stabilization norm using Bayesian networks, thus allowing robots to recognize slopes or steps and plan the locomotion accordingly.

Finally, the fifth part describes in detail the application of the PDAC to the different forms of locomotion studied. It starts with the lateral and sagittal motion control, followed by the heel-off walking control, and then goes into the 3-D biped walking, first in regular surfaces and later in rough terrain. In the sequel, the quadruped walking and the brachiation control using the PDAC scheme is presented.

Despite some minor typos and grammar faults, all these chapters describe the subjects with sufficient detail, allowing the understanding of the introduced concepts. All mathematical aspects are also thoroughly presented.

In conclusion, this book will be of interest mainly to scientists, researchers and students working in robotics locomotion and bio-inspired robotics, but can also be interesting to other readers interested in the more general areas of robotics and control.

Manuel Silva and AdjuntoISEP-Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Portugal