15th International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots and the Support Technologies for Mobile Machines, Maryland, United States Of America, 23 - 26 July 2012, pp.231-238
Despite the well-understood effects and benefits, half-circular compliant legs are difficult in terms of modeling and analyzing. In many studies, simplified models have been used, which have a number of assumptions and whose validity need to be verified either against the actual physical system or against a more accurate simulation model. Leaving the experimental validation issues to the future works, the aim of this study is to come up with a more accurate simulation model of the half-circular compliant leg with the minimum number of assumptions, approximations and simplifications. For this purpose, Simulink/SimMechanics modeling and simulation environment is considered. We believe that our simulation model to be a better approximation of the system behavior because, it allows for a more general leg shape during locomotion. Also, slippage conditions can be carried out. The simulation is more general overall, allowing a distributed leg mass, non-planar leg behavior as well as allowing wider contact area with the surface.