Realization of a Bio-inspired Cheetah Robot with a flexible Spine

A bio-inspired cheetah robot is presented in this study. To mimic the sharply spine motion which is considered as an important improvement for speed, a passive articulated spine joint is introduced in the cheetah robot. In addition, the other main feature of cheetah robot is the active three-segment leg. For actuating and controlling the cheetah robot, a new control strategy is presented based on the biological inspired central pattern generator. Moreover, there are two control modes in the controller: the continuous mode is used to control the joint motion of legs; the discrete mode is used to compensate the system energy. At last, the bounding gait is realized with different velocities. Through contrastive analyzing the kinematics between bounding gait with and without spine joint, it is concluded that: the introduced passive spine joint will improve the dynamic stability of cheetah running; and the higher is the running velocity, the higher is the dynamic stability.