Hopping with Elastic Restitution Is More Difficult Than It Seems

Taylor McLaughlin, Marion Anderson, Shai Revzen

Bulletin of the American Physical Society, 2020

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Abstract

Bouncing rubber balls and hopping on pogo sticks might suggest that building a robot that hops with a significant fraction of elastic energy restitution would be straightforward. Using spring steel legs with 99% restitution individually, we built a three-legged hopper. The hopper achieved a minute 11.2% restitution when using the springs in series with the actuators. We present five generations of three-legged hoppers: four have actuators in series with springs. Three different types of ground contact were tested. Our best design so far uses actuators in parallel with the springs, and achieves 49+/-5% restitution. This work will be of use to those interested in using elastic energy storage in legged locomotion.

BibTeX

@conference{mclaughlin2020hopping,
  author = {McLaughlin, Taylor and Anderson, Marion and Revzen, Shai},
  title = {Hopping with Elastic Restitution Is More Difficult Than It Seems},
  booktitle = {American Physical Society},
  year = {2020},
  publisher = {American Physical Society},
  journal = {Bulletin of the American Physical Society},
  url = {https://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR20/Session/S22.11},
  cvtopic = {design}
}