Aerial Posture Adjustment of a Bio-Inspired Jumping Robot for Safe Landing: Modeling and Simulation

The aerial posture adjustment of jumping robots are very important for them to land safely. The body of our previous jumping robot rotates in the air which may lead to damage of its fragile parts during landing. In this paper, the aerial posture adjustment of the robot is investigated by modeling and simulation. Firstly, inspired by aerial posture adjustment of animals and insects, the robot model with a pole leg and an additional weight (AW) is introduced. Then, the simulations of the model are conducted. Specifically, the jumping without and with active posture adjusting in the air are simulated. The effects of the length of the pole leg, the mass of the AW, and the leg's driving torque on aerial posture adjusting performances are studied. The simulation results show that the active adjusting with the pole leg system can change the aerial posture of the robot and make it land with a safe posture with proper adjusting the parameters. The results of this paper verify the feasibility of the proposed aerial posture adjustment method which will help us to develop more robust jumping robot for applications in unstructured environments.