Design,Simulation and Experiment of a Bionic Hopper for Planet Exploration

According to the kangaroo's hopping principle and its characteristics and five-bar geared mechanism,a kind of micro-hopping robot for planetary exploration is designed which can jump intermittently. This paper proposes the kangaroo's structure,moving morphology and the hopping model with closed-chain mechanism which provides nonlinear driving force for the robot. By using the D-H theory,the robot motion equations are set up,and the hopping tread,bionic motion feature and hopping efficiency are analyzed. Then,the whole structure of the robot design is given. In order to prove the validity of this closed-chain bionic hopping mechanism and its motion,the robot dynamics model is established and the whole motion period is simulated with ADAMS. The energy efficiency of hopping mechanism is improved(it can be up to 70%) ,and the possibility of taking off in advance is eliminated. Finally,a prototype of hopping robot is developed and the hopping experiment are made. The experiment result shows that the simulation and the real jumping are almost identical. This robot,with 1.4 kg weight,can get to 813 mm at length and 471 mm at height. So the hopping problem of the robot driven by a micro-motor is solved.