摘要：Many legged robots have compliant mechanisms in the distal segments of their legs called distal compliance. One important function of such characteristic is to buffer landing impact at touchdown. However, there is still no general design strategy for it. In particular, nonlinear compliance behaviors are supposed to be more beneficial than linear ones, yet it is open what type of nonlinearity is a good fit. From this perspective, we used a simple spring–mass model performing free drop to investigate the design principles of distal compliance. The model includes damping and preload in spring and realistic limitations on spring compression, therefore gives a straightforward correspondence with actual hardware systems. We confirmed the benefits of using distal compliance over purely stiff structures, in terms of landing impact buffering. By assessing the relative influences of a variety of compliance configurations through numerical simulations, we found that for compliance behaviors of the same average stiffness, nonlinearities had little effect on the impact magnitude (
关键词：Legged robots; leg distal compliance; landing impact; nonlinear compliance
