Proposal for a Series-Driven Catapult Using Soft Actuators to Increase the Jumping Height of Hyper Jumping Humanoid Robot

This paper proposes a series-driven catapult to increase the jumping height of humanoid robots to improve the mobility on an uneven ground at disaster sites or in the industrial industry. This research aims to increase the single vertical jumping height of humanoid robots by using the developed series-driven catapult. The humanoid robot in the existing study with McKibben-type artificial muscles in parallel to the body have disadvantages: the muscles act on the joints in an assistive manner and the jumping height improve only a few tens of millimetres. In this paper, a series-driven catapult connected in series to a human robot is developed. Its effect on jumping height was verified experimentally. As a result, a maximum jumping height of 0.35 m was recorded. The use of a series-driven catapult increased the jumping height by up to 0.15 m, which is 1.78 times higher than the jumping height without a series-driven catapult. These results show that the use of a series-driven catapult increase the jumping height of humanoid robots and is expected to extend their dynamic behaviors.