Towards Multi-Body Analyses for Advanced Flexible Robotic Systems

Manufacturers answered to the global competition rise by increasing the efficiency of their development process by substituing the hardware tests with their virtual counterpart. Following the same idea, in this paper, the introduction of the virtual prototyping technique in the design of a complex robotic leg is proposed. The novelty of this work is double: the first motivation lies on the characteristic of the mechanism, since it is a FLEXible jumping LEG; the second one, instead, regards to the introduction of methods well known in other research field but rarely used in robotics. This paper describes the whole design process, while the assembly of the physical prototype, the control development and the experimental tests will be matters of future works.