Piezoelectrically Actuated Biomimetic Self-Contained Quadruped Bounding Robot

This paper presents the development of a mesoscale self-contained quadruped mobile robot that employs two pieces of piezocomposite actuators for the bounding locomotion. The design of the robot leg is inspired by legged insects and animals, and the biomimetic concept is implemented in the robot in a simplified form, such that each leg of the robot has only one degree of freedom. The lack of degree of freedom is compensated by a slope of the robot frame relative to the horizontal plane. For the implementation of the self-contained mobile robot, a small power supply circuit is designed and installed on the robot. Experimental results show that the robot can locomote at about 50 mm·s−1·with the circuit on board, which can be considered as a significant step toward the goal of building an autonomous legged robot actuated by piezoelectric actuators.