[Purpose] This study investigated the changes in the muscle activities of the trunk and lower limbs of healthy adults during a one-legged bridge exercise using a sling, and with the addition of hip abduction. [Subjects and Methods] Twenty-seven healthy individuals participated in this study (14 males and 13 females). The participants were instructed to perform the bridge exercises under five di...

Four-bar linkage mechanisms produced by many designers of knee joints for trans-femoral prostheses can provide knee rotation to permit walking only. In Afro-Asian countries people are accustomed to a squatting posture in their daily activities. A six-bar linkage knee-ankle mechanism trans-femoral prosthesis is described which was developed and fitted to an amputee. The motion patterns of the an...

Locomotion for legged robots poses considerable challenges when confronted by obstacles and adverse environments. Footstep planners are typically only designed for one mode of locomotion, but traversing unfavorable environments may require several forms of locomotion to be sequenced together, such as walking, crawling, and jumping. Multimodal motion planners can be used to address some of these...

In this chapter, we introduce legged robots. After introducing the history of legged robot research in Sect. 16.1, we start to discuss hopping robots and analyze a simple passive walker as a typical cycling walking robot in Sect. 16.2; the Poincaré map is one of the most important tools to analyze its dynamics and stability. In Sect. 16.3, the dynamics and control of general biped robots are di...

Articulated robots such as legged robots hold the promise to lead to versatile, multi purpose machines that eventually become useful in many application scenarios such as construction sites, disaster recovery, service robotics and remote inspection. For these tasks a great deal of kinematic flexibility and dexterity is required. As the inspiring examples in biology show, arms and legs are usefu...

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of active muscle mass on cardiovascular drift (CVdrift) during prolonged exercise. Twelve subjects with peak oxygen uptake (VO2peak) of 3.52 ± 0.52 L·min(-1) (mean ± SD) cycled for 55 min with 80 revolutions per minute with either two legs (2-legged) or one leg (1-legged). Oxygen uptake was at 60% of VO2peak throughout the 2-legged trial and at ...

In this paper, we studied numerically both kinematic and dynamic models of a biologically inspired mammal-like octopod robot walking with a tetrapod gait. Three different nonlinear oscillators were used to drive the robot’s legs working as central pattern generators. In addition, also a new, relatively simple and efficient model was proposed and investigated. The introduced model of the gait ge...

As a robot could be stable statically standing on three or more legs, a six legged walking robot can be highly flexible in movements and perform different missions without dealing with serious kinematic and dynamic problems. An experimental six legged walking robot with 18 degrees of freedom is studied and built in this paper. The kinematic and gait analysis formulations are demonstrated by an e...

This letter studies jumping for wheeled-bipedal robots, a motion that takes full advantage of the benefits from hybrid wheeled and legged design features. A comprehensive hierarchical scheme planning control with robots is developed. Underactuation dynamics main difficulty to be addressed, especially in problem. To tackle this issue, novel wheeled-spring-loaded inverted pendulum (W-SLIP) model ...

Legged and wheeled locomotion are two standard methods used by robots to perform navigation. Combining them create a hybrid legged-wheeled results in increased speed, agility, reconfigurability for the robot, allowing it traverse multitude of environments. The CENTAURO robot has these advantages, but they accompanied higher-dimensional search space formulating autonomous economical motion plans...