Energy allocation in landing buffering process for biomimetic locust mechanism

Landing buffer is one of the important problems for the research of biomimetic locust jumping robot. Because the sizes of forelegs, midlegs and hindlegs are different, the energy allocation for each leg affects the magnitude of impact forces and muscle forces in legs, and thus affects the buffer performance. Based on the experiment observation for the locust's structure and landing buffering process, the springs are used to replace the locust's leg muscles, and biomimetic locust mechanism is established. The force analysis is carried out for the mechanism in order to obtain the relationship between the supporting force the ground to each leg of mechanism and the spring stiffness coefficient. Based on the supporting forces, the spring forces and the different impact resistance of each leg, the energy allocation principle is proposed which makes the forces be gradual changes and no impact load, and the spring stiffness coefficient of each leg can be obtained according to this principle. As can be seen from the example, the supporting forces and the spring forces accord with the different impact resistance of legs and the trends of the forces are smoothly, which mean that the mechanism can obtain the better buffering performance. It shows the feasibility of this method, and provides a basis for the selection of the springs of biomimetic locust mechanism.