Frog-inspired jumping robot actuated by pneumatic muscle actuators

Jumping robots can be widely applied in archeology, interstellar probe, antiterrorism, and resource exploration. This article adopts the frog as the bionic object and briefly analyzes biological features and jumping movements in a complete jumping sequence of the frog. Then an equivalent six-bar mechanism model depicting frog jumping movement is built up, and the optimizing simulation of the six-bar mechanism model is performed. On the basis of the optimized results, the robot is designed and prototype is manufactured. An adaptive cascade controller is proposed to control the robot. Proportional–integral–derivative parameters of the controller are tuned online using radial basis function neural network to deal with nonlinearities of the robot. Jumping experiment demonstrates the jumping capacity of the robot and the ability of the proposed controller in tracking the desired trajectories.