Proposed Design of a Triped Robot

Nature may be drawn upon as inspirations for robotic de-sign. Biomimetics is the term used when the goal becomes replicating biological mechanisms. This method leverages the evolution of a life form over the course of many iter-ations. The concept of “better than bio ” has emerged in order to combat functional fixedness that can occur from biomimetics. The goal of design being to take a biologi-cally inspired base and then improve upon it with classical engineering methods. This paper presents an analysis of the locomotion, energy consumption, and control of a tripedal robot. The aim is to gain insight into a perceived gap in evolution and ap-ply results to robotics design. This is achieved through the construction of a SimMechanics model of an 11 degree of freedom 2S4P triped robot, the characteristics of which are similar to the biped developed by Raibert et. al [18]