Foot of leg of a walking robot: Design and calculation of parameters

In the field of modern robotics, anthropomorphic designs of walking robots are becoming increasingly popular. This trend is due to the versatility of the functions that mobile robots of this type can perform. One of the problems of operating walking robots is to ensure their stability when moving on surfaces of various topologies. It is known that the stability of a walking robot depends on the speed and acceleration of its movement, the mass of the robot and its payload, the position of the center of gravity of the robot's body, and also on the specific pressure on the ground along which the robot moves. The present research is devoted to the last problem. In the article, the authors proposed a fundamentally new design of the foot of a walking robot, which allows you to adjust the specific pressure on the ground by changing the area of the robot's supporting surface. When a walking robot moves from a hard surface to loose soils, such as sand, snow, soft marshy soils, and others, the new foot design allows you to increase the area of support thereby reducing the specific pressure on the ground, and, therefore, increases the stability of the robot. The article also provides analytical formulas for calculating the parameters of a new foot of a walking robot, namely the magnitude of the movements of the toes, their speed, the variable bearing area of the foot, the specific pressure on the ground, and the strength of the elastic elements of the robot foot. Graphical dependences of these parameters are also presented in the form of diagrams that will help researchers and engineers create similar structures with variable ground pressure. The main motivation for these studies was to increase the stability of the walking robot by regulating the specific pressure on various soils on which the mobile robot can move.