2023/12/07 by Enrico Mingo Hoffman, Andrea Curti, Hoffman, Enrico Mingo +10 · 1 citation
Engineering · #Aerospace Engineering and Energy Systems #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Prosthetics and Rehabilitation Robotics #Robotic Locomotion and Control #Robotics (cs.RO)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.04161
openalex publication_date 2023/12/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This paper presents the modeling and numerical analysis of the Kangaroo lower body prototype, a novel bipedal humanoid robot developed and manufactured by PAL Robotics. Kangaroo features high-power linear electric actuators combined with unique serial-parallel hybrid chains, which allow for the positioning of all the leg actuators near the base of the robot in order to improve the overall mass distribution. To model and analyze such complex nonlinear mechanisms, we employ a constrained formulation that is extended to account for floating-base systems in contact with the environment. A comparison is made to demonstrate the significant improvements achieved with TALOS, another humanoid bipedal robot designed by PAL Robotics, in terms of equivalent Cartesian inertia at the feet and centroidal angular momentum. Finally, the paper includes numerical experiments conducted through simulation and preliminary tests performed on the actual Kangaroo platform.