Bio-Inspired Legged Locomotion
"Biomechanically Informed Phase-Aware Control of a Muscle-Mimetic Legged Robot"
Role: Graduate Research Assistant
In my master’s research, I developed a bio-inspired soft quadruped robot actuated by 30 McKibben-type pneumatic artificial muscles, designed to replicate the distributed compliance and nonlinear force generation of greyhound musculoskeletal anatomy. The robot’s mechanical structure and actuator layout were informed by anatomical proportions, enabling muscle-like antagonistic actuation across multi-DOF limbs and providing a physical substrate for embodied, compliant locomotion.
The core contribution of this work lies in phase-aware coordination of compliant actuation rather than high-bandwidth rigid control. I implemented phase-synchronized torque control that explicitly coordinates stance and swing dynamics to regulate force production across the gait cycle. A compliant sensing and control framework integrated pressure feedback from pneumatic muscles with IMU-informed joint-phase estimation, closing the loop on both muscle state and body dynamics. This approach exploits embodied compliance to improve robustness to terrain and load variation while reducing reliance on aggressive feedback control.
Through phase-aware coordination of muscle-like actuators, the robot achieved an 80% increase in locomotion speed and a 25% improvement in walking stability. Force tracking accuracy improved by 30%, and overall energy consumption was reduced by 18%, demonstrating the efficiency benefits of combining compliant actuation with proprioceptive phase estimation. This project highlights how biologically grounded actuation and sensing can be leveraged to produce stable, energy-efficient motor behavior, offering insights relevant to legged locomotion, manipulation through compliance, and embodied motor intelligence.
Research Outputs:
Invited Talks:
1. You Wear It Well Podcast: Design of a bio-inspired musculoskeletal soft quadruped robot, November 2023
Research Support:
Scholarship:
This research is supported by the Japanese Government (Monbukagakusho) Scholarship that is funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan.