The effect of leg compliance in multi-directional jumping of a flea-inspired mechanism

Abstract

or less), conversion efficiency rapidly drops to near 0% because the leg bends so much that it cannot support the thrusting force. The optimal conversion efficiency tends to increase when the mechanism jumps vertically owing to reduced slippage and increased ground reaction force. These investigations show that optimizing leg compliance can improve the performance of a jumping robot by up to 5% by enabling more of the initially stored energy in the leg to be used. This finding will likely prove helpful for choosing the leg stiffness for a small-scale jumping robot.