Development of a Real and Simulation Testbed for Legged Robot Soil Interaction

Zusammenfassung (Abstract) :

For legged robots, evaluation of the overall mobility performance on different soil types is a requirement to guarantee a good walking behavior. Therefore, it is important to develop models and simulations of the overall to help build these interaction models and for the verification and validation of the simulation, intensive robot testing in a lab environment is necessary and should occur hand in hand with their development. This paper describes the design and development of a new testbed for legged robot systems. This testbed consists of a soil testbed, a 7DoF robotic arm, and software architecture to perform both real and simulated experiments with different robot legs and other test objects. The testbed is used to study and analyse the test objects interaction with the soil and their terramechanical properties to help build models that are used in the design of real robots and in the overall simulations of these systems. Results with analysis for experiments and simulations are presented together with the testbed setup design.

Stichworte :

terramechanics, testbed, soil contact interactions, legged robots, simulation