FROGBOT - THE LOW ANGULAR

MOMENTUM JUMPING ROBOT

AE3-418 Application Exercise Team Report

Group 3: B. Bastek, X. Chen, T. Hazu, A. Hirjanu,

H. Mody, A. Rauch, A. Tutcuoglu

13th of March, 2015

Initial Design

tions are outlined in [1]. The mass was initially

taken to be 30 g, owing to the assumption of
achieving max. distance through the stiffest usable spring, thus causing the highest mass. The
release is initiated via a smooth 1/4th-fraction on
the penultimate gear, thus allowing the final gear
and the pulley mounted on the same shaft to freely
rotate and rapidly convert elastic into kinetic energy. The choice of this mechanism had the advantage of simplicity, but experienced varying torque
unlike for a cam-shaft [1]. Three sets of compound
gears were used to achieve a gear ratio of 1/120
from the motor shaft at 1200 rpm to the pulley,
thus fully bending Frogbot within 4.5 s. Particular care was given to the final wheels diameter,
allowing one full stretch and avoiding mechanical
restriction with the base via Dwheel l/(3/4).
The form of leg-bending and the robot itself are
such that apart from initial turning around the
foremost part of the legs in the take-off stage,
barely any of the energy is lost into angular momentum. A posteriori constraints consisted in
the motors maximum possible torque and the required battery voltage, which was not to exceed
4.5 V - a voltage imposed by the highest voltage
a motor of reasonable mass could take.

The baseline design concept of this robot is to

achieve a high jumping efficiency, i.e. maximising
the ratio of horizontal reach on a flat ground to
the robots size, while keeping mass below 30 g.
In order to attain these high efficiencies current
problems of jumping robots are addressed, including premature take-off, unfavourable angular momentum after take-off and the merit of glide. An
innovative, bio-inspired solution was found in imitating a frogs jumping mechanism.
The initial design consists of a mini motor driving
a group of compactly-arranged compound gears.
Energy is transferred from the motor to a pulley that winds up a string, such that the two-bar
linkage system with a tensile spring in between
is folded in the aforementioned frog-like manner and electric is converted to potential energy.
Upon arrival at the most compressed state, a release mechanism removes the rotational constraint
on the wheel shaft, therefore allowing elastic to be
converted into kinetic energy, which in return initiates the Frogbots jumping motion.
The design is then categorised into electronics,
mechanism, and structural aspects. The initial
structure of jumping arm, gear platform, and base
are optimised by FEA (Fig. 4d), which allows
to optimise weight throughout the design process
within the criterion of strength to avoid structural
failure. The other focus point was the CG of the
model, which is the main driving force of design
optimisation, in the sense of the ability to stand as
well as conserving horizontal symmetry and keeping it on the line of action, again inspired by the
frog. Referring to [2], no wings are attached, since
for locomotion on level terrain, this leads to larger
horizontal jumping distances.

Figure 1: Overview of the different components of

the Frogbot.

Mechanical Considerations

Since a high-fidelity optimisation of the entire

robot is infeasible due to the number of constraints
and uncertainties, a priori assumptions were made
and goals set. Based on the ability of the 7g robot
to jump 1m vertically [1], a horizontal range of
r =1.5m was considered reasonable. Additionally, similar sizes were aimed for and therefore an
initial maximum span of 7cm for the spring was
chosen. Solving the energy-minimisation problem
(vopt , opt ) = arg min(v,)
v,
) under the con E(
straint r(
v,
) 1.5m, neglecting losses through
friction and assuming that the contribution of angular momentum to kinetic energy is negligible, a
stiffness constant of k = 0.82N/mm was yielded.
The equation of motion and underlying assump-

Controls

In order to remote control the motor, a lightsensitive circuit was employed. The circuit depicted in Fig. 3 includes a light dependent resistor
(LDR), transistor, resistor, battery and the motor.
As light falls on the LDR, the voltage drop across
it decreases, thus increasing the base voltage of the
transistor. The voltage further increases up to a
value of 0.7 V, after which the collector-emitter
current rapidly increases, resulting in a voltage of
3.3 V applied to the motor. The resistance R1 was
chosen such as to avoid too low resistances at the
LDR during daylight.
2

Manufacturing Process

resulting in instability. The platform contributed

to nearly 50% of the total mass due to an inefficient arrangement of the gears. The platform was
hence transferred to the inner side of the model,
with a more compact arrangement of the gears,
shown in Fig. 1 and 2b.

Due to the complex shapes of the arms, base

and gear platform, 3D printing was used for
their manufacturing as it allows for high freedom of design in addition to structural integrity
and low density. The material used for the prototypes changed from a rubber-plastic mixture
which proved too flexible regarding arm deformation (Fig. 4b), to ABS plastic with improved stiffness. The gears were positioned onto aluminium
tubes which were held by the platform with interference fits. This was to prevent out of plane
motions whilst also allowing for smooth rotations
of the gears around their shafts. Solely the final
gear in the assembly was fixed to the shaft thus allowing for torque to be transmitted to the pulley,
which was also fixed to shaft. Friction of the rotating gears was reduced using grease. The length of
the legs, which were attached to the base, was minimised by balancing the need for stability, by taking into account the CG thus avoiding topplingover, and the need for the ability to jump. Carbon
fibre rods were initially used to reduce the mass
but were replaced by aluminium rods, due to their
inability to resist the bending moments that were
present during take-off and landing. All joints on
the 4 arms used aluminium rods as well. The motor shaft was sanded down to a smaller diameter
to allow for a gear to be put on. The plastic gears
were purchased from suppliers listed in Tab 1.

Results

The results were twofold: on the one hand,

in terms of the jumping mechanism the Frogbot
showed favourable properties. Despite a considerably lower range of 15 cm during testing upon mechanic loading by hand, a straight jump was performed with little rotation. Autonomously however, the robot did not achieve to jump. The reason for this lied in the last gear-pulley-shaft, for
which the tolerance of the hole was too large, thus
allowing minimal out-of-plane rotations which allowed the gear to jump back and prevented the
pulley from spinning. Furthermore, as shown in
Fig. 4e, it was observed, that the structure inhibits a mechanism, thus causing the legs to shift
and the structure to lose its symmetric property.
Two potential solutions are proposed for the former problem: a bearing would reliably keep the
gear in plane and prevent tooth-skipping. The
attachment however could cause problems, since
the platform is 3D printed and the bearing would
have to be glued, which again could imply offsets. Alternatively, a second platform could be
attached, such as to ensure that the shafts axis
will not shift. This however would add significant
mass, which could compromise the robots ability
of meeting the imposed constraint of a max. mass
of 30 g. As for the mechanism, it was proposed
to install a positioning-shaft (Fig. 4f) to predefine
the compression, thus establishing a determinant
structure.

Modifications & Iterations

During the process of manufacturing, possible

improvements and modifications to the robot were
identified. The first model that was built, depicted
in Fig. 2a, highlighted the issue that the majority
of the mass of the robot was distributed on the
top, owing to an oversized platform, resulting in
a robot with a CG too far forwards, thus toppling References
over in both static and dynamic testing. In ad- [1] Kovac, M.; Fuchs, M.; Guignard, A.; Zufferey,
dition, due to the small size of the parts, difficulJ.-C.; Floreano, D., A miniature 7g jumpties were encountered when assembling by hand
ing robot, Robotics and Automation, 2008.
such as the gear shafts not being perpendicular
ICRA 2008. IEEE International Conference on
to the platform and the fixation of the spring to
, vol., no., pp.373,378, 19-23 May 2008 doi:
the arms. From the first fabricated robot to the
10.1109/ROBOT.2008.4543236
final one, major changes were made to the gear
platform geometry and position and the jumping [2] Kovac, M.; Hraiz, W.; Fauria, O.; Zufferey, J.C.; Floreano, D., The EPFL jumpglider: A
arms. The arms were optimised twice after manhybrid jumping and gliding robot with rigid
ufacturing, based on FEA, to an optimised conor folding wings, Robotics and Biomimetfiguration giving weight reductions of 30% comics (ROBIO), 2011 IEEE International Conpared to the initial design, shown in Fig. 4a. The
ference on , vol., no., pp.1503,1508, 7-11 Dec.
initial gear platform on the top of the robot was
2011 doi: 10.1109/ROBIO.2011.6181502
found to be the biggest issue for a forwards CG,

Figure 3: Circuit used for remote control.

Figure 2: CAD-Designs a) before and b) after the
design iteration.
2

Figure 4: Frogbot legs a) in their old overly-flexible form, b) after permanent distortion c) after certain
design iterations. d) Von-Mises stress distribution. Illustration of the e) mechanism dilemma and f)
the suggested solution using a positioning-shaft.
Table 1: Cost Sheet incl. quantity and manufacturer
Item

Quantity

Cost

Supplier

Metal wire
Plastic wire
Motor
Battery
Electronics (excl. Motor, Battery)
Spring
CFRP rod
Total cost

2
1
1
1
1
14
10

7.20
3.95
16.98
5.75
3.79
17.76
5.00
60.43

Bead Shop & Amazon/Sourcingmap

Amazon/Sourcingmap
Solarbotics Ltd.
Atomic Workshop
Imperial Robotics Society
Entex Stock Springs
Ebay