Bioinspired Legged Locomotion: Models, Concepts, Control and Applications explores the universe of legged robots, bringing in perspectives from engineering, biology, motion science, and medicine to provide a comprehensive overview of the field. With comprehensive coverage, each chapter brings outlines, and an abstract, introduction, new developments, and a summary. Beginning with bio-inspired locomotion concepts, the book's editors present a thorough review of current literature that is followed by a more detailed view of bouncing, swinging, and balancing, the three fundamental sub functions of locomotion. This part is closed with a presentation of conceptual models for locomotion. Next, the book explores bio-inspired body design, discussing the concepts of motion control, stability, efficiency, and robustness. The morphology of legged robots follows this discussion, including biped and quadruped designs. Finally, a section on high-level control and applications discusses neuromuscular models, closing the book with examples of applications and discussions of performance, efficiency, and robustness. At the end, the editors share their perspective on the future directions of each area, presenting state-of-the-art knowledge on the subject using a structured and consistent approach that will help researchers in both academia and industry formulate a better understanding of bioinspired legged robotic locomotion and quickly apply the concepts in research or products. - Presents state-of-the-art control approaches with biological relevance - Provides a thorough understanding of the principles of organization of biological locomotion - Teaches the organization of complex systems based on low-dimensional motion concepts/control - Acts as a guideline reference for future robots/assistive devices with legged architecture - Includes a selective bibliography on the most relevant published articles

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Bio-Inspired Robotics" that was published in Applied Sciences

Nowadays, multiple attention have been paid on a robot working in the human living environment, such as in the field of medical, welfare, entertainment and so on. Various types of researches are being conducted actively in a variety of fields such as artificial intelligence, cognitive engineering, sensor- technology, interfaces and motion control. In the future, it is expected to realize super high functional human-like robot by integrating technologies in various fields including these types of researches. The book represents new developments and advances in the field of bio-inspired robotics research introducing the state of the art, the idea of multi-locomotion robotic system to implement the diversity of animal motion. It covers theoretical and computational aspects of Passive Dynamic Autonomous Control (PDAC), robot motion control, multi legged walking and climbing as well as brachiation focusing concrete robot systems, components and applications. In addition, gorilla type robot systems are described as hardware of Multi-Locomotion Robotic system. It is useful for students and researchers in the field of robotics in general, bio-inspired robots, multi-modal locomotion, legged walking, motion control, and humanoid robots. Furthermore, it is also of interest for lecturers and engineers in practice building systems cooperating with humans.

This book, by a leading authority on legged locomotion, presents exciting engineering and science, along with fascinating implications for theories of human motor control. It lays fundamental groundwork in legged locomotion, one of the least developed areas of robotics, addressing the possibility of building useful legged robots that run and balance. The book describes the study of physical machines that run and balance on just one leg, including analysis, computer simulation, and laboratory experiments. Contrary to expectations, it reveals that control of such machines is not particularly difficult. It describes how the principles of locomotion discovered with one leg can be extended to systems with several legs and reports preliminary experiments with a quadruped machine that runs using these principles. Raibert's work is unique in its emphasis on dynamics and active balance, aspects of the problem that have played a minor role in most previous work. His studies focus on the central issues of balance and dynamic control, while avoiding several problems that have dominated previous research on legged machines. Marc Raibert is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie-Mellon University and on the editorial board of The MIT Press journal, Robotics Research. Legged Robots That Balanceis fifteenth in the Artificial Intelligence Series, edited by Patrick Winston and Michael Brady.

The increasing presence of mobile robots in our everyday lives introduces the requirements for their intelligent and autonomous features. Therefore the next generation of mobile robots should be more self-capable, in respect to: increasing of their functionality in unforeseen situations, decreasing of the human involvement in their everyday operations and their maintenance; being robust; fault tolerant and reliable in their operation. Although mobile robotic systems have been a topic of research for decades and aside the technology improvements nowadays, the subject on how to program and making them more autonomous in their operations is still an open field for research. Applying bio-inspired, organic approaches in robotics domain is one of the methodologies that are considered that would help on making the robots more autonomous and self-capable, i.e. having properties such as: self-reconfiguration, self-adaptation, self-optimization, etc. In this book several novel biologically inspired approaches for walking robots (multi-legged and humanoid) domain are introduced and elaborated. They are related to self-organized and self-stabilized robot walking, anomaly detection within robot systems using self-adaptation, and mitigating the faulty robot conditions by self-reconfiguration of a multi-legged walking robot. The approaches presented have been practically evaluated in various test scenarios, the results from the experiments are discussed in details and their practical usefulness is validated.