Compact Posture Control System for Jumping Robot Using an Air Reaction Wheel

In this article, we propose a novel balance control method called air reaction wheel (ARW) for a small-scale legged jumping robot, which can generate high torque while being compact and lightweight. The ARW generates torque in the same direction through the combination of the torque induced by pushing the air, and the moment of inertia of ARW with the angular acceleration of the motor, resulting in high torque performance while being lighter and more compact than conventional balance control mechanisms. To validate the torque performance of the ARW, we conduct dynamic analysis and computational fluid dynamics simulations of the ARW and utilize a central composite face model to find the optimal shape for generating high torque. Furthermore, we verify that the proposed method generates high torque while being compact and lightweight compared to the conventional methods through theoretical analysis and comparative experiments on the ARW and existing mechanisms regarding torque performance. Finally, we conducted jump and landing experiments by attaching the optimized ARW model to a jumping robot, and through experimental results, we verified that the proposed mechanism contributes to stable jumping and landing.