Abstract
Introduction
The earliest complete research on a hopping robot can be traced back to 1980s when Raibert developed several hopping robot prototypes with his co-workers. 1 His hopping robot had a body hinged by one springy leg on which he experimentally realized a hopping gait including height control, forward velocity control and attitude control. Actually, he used a simple method to control the hopping height by delivering a fixed thrust to the leg. Though he declared the hopping height is monotonic to the thrust, the value and duration of the thrust were determined empirically. Saranli et al. 2 introduced the spring loaded inverted pendulum (SLIP) model, and demonstrated its equivalence to a more complex leg with hip, knee, and ankle. In spite of its simplicity, the SLIP model is still priceless in revealing the mechanism and dynamics of animal running.
The SLIP model attracts many scholars to study it because it can imply some specific high-level control hypotheses on the coordination between the joints and limbs of animal that produces perfect locomotion. M. Ahmadi et al. presented experimental implementation of an energy efficient “controlled passive dynamic running” strategy on a planar one-legged running robot “ARL monopod II” based on a SLIP model. 3 This controller could reach a high energy coefficient of utilization. Later he demonstrated the stability of the limit cycle in the hopping robot. 4 Akihiro Sato designed an experimental, planar, hopping robot platform based on SLIP model features and implemented a conceptual controller that reproduced the self-stability of the SLIP model. 5 Ioannis Poulakakis et al. investigated the hybrid zero dynamic of a hopper with an asymmetric centre of mass and achieved the ASLIP (asymmetric spring loaded inverted Pendulum) model. 6 It can stand for most kinds of robots in a hopping motion, thus the ASLIP model tends to possess some universal properties to some extent.
Although the SLIP model is simple and easy to analyse, it does not take the unsprung mass on the bottom of the leg into consideration and neglects the impact between the foot and the ground. To obtain more accurate dynamics of the hopping robot it is essential to take the lower leg into account. Y. Saitou et al. proposed a two-mass system and controlled the height of the hopping robot according to the optimal control method. 7 Ishikawa et al. controlled the apex jumping height of a two-mass system by using a port-controlled Hamiltonian method in view of the system energy. 8 In spite of taking the lower leg into consideration, they did not think about the impact between the leg and ground. Frank B. Mathis also used the two-mass model to describe a hopping robot, 9 and modelled the impact instant alone. He designed a continuous controller and a discrete controller for the apex height control, but he did not control the impact force directly so that there was a relatively giant force.
In this paper we model a one-legged hopping robot as a tow-mass system, and model the ground as a springy damping system so that the contact force between the lower leg and the ground changes continuously in a very short time interval rather than changing instantly. What is more important is that we can make use of the interval to control the contact force tracing desired value. Next we use a kind of linear control method to drive the closed-loop system to converge to a stable limit cycle corresponding to a certain apex height of the upper leg. In Section ‘Model of the two-mass hopping robot’ we present the model of a two-mass hopping robot and its dynamical equations including the contact phase and flight phase. In Section ‘Control of the apex height of the upper leg’ we propose a kind of control algorithm based on the inner force loop in contact phase and a simple PD controller in flight phase. In Section ‘Stable limit cycle of the closed loop system’ we analyse the closed-loop system dynamics and the limit cycle of the closed-loop system, then present a simple but efficient controller. We show the simulation results in Section ‘Simulation’ to demonstrate its efficiency of the algorithm. At the end of the paper, there is some discussion in the last section.
Model of the two-mass hopping robot
As shown in Figure 1(a), the system includes two components whose masses are denoted by

(a) The schematic diagram of the two-mass model, (b) forces acting on the masses.
Flight Phase
When the system stays in flight phase as shown in the right side of Figure 1(b), it is not in contact with the ground.
where
Stance phase
Stance phase means the stage in which the second mass
because in stance phase it is difficult to measure position and velocity of the second mass
where
where
Control of the apex height of the upper leg
To control the apex height of the upper leg, we still divide the controller into two parts, flight phase and contact phase. The controller is presented next.
Flight phase
In order to keep the velocity of the two masses identical, the relative position Δ
where
We can conclude from equation (7) that Δ
Contact phase
On the basis of the analysis in Section ‘Model of the two-mass hopping robot’, we realise that the main control target could be described as “ensure the upper leg is speeding up to the desired velocity at the desired height before lifting off”. On the other hand the contact force is another factor which needs to be considered because a lesser impact force is significant to avoid damaging the robot. In view of the above thought, a kind of control algorithm based on the inner force loop is applied in the contact phase. The structure of the controller is shown in Figure 2.

The control block diagram of contact phase.
Actually, the analysis of the system dynamics in contact phase and this control algorithm were presented in our other paper and we rewrite the control law below.
10
The
where
where
The control frequency of the inner force loop is about ten times of the outer position loop. When the system is well controlled, the real contact force is equal to the desired value, that is to say
Stable limit cycle of the closed loop system
Dynamics of the closed-form system
Flight phase dynamics of the closed-form system is presented in Section ‘Control of the apex height of the upper leg’, that is to say equation (7). When the system reaches a steady state, the dynamics of the upper leg becomes
At the beginning of flight, the leg shrinks and the dynamics of the upper leg does not obey equation (7), but the system energy is preserved as constant once the robot lifts off, so that it could be supposed that the two masses lift off with the same velocity and a constant leg length, then the equivalent initial velocity of the upper leg is
besides
We can obtain the trajectory of the upper leg in the
Because gravity is the only external force acting on the system, the height of the upper leg has even symmetry about the apex height
In contact phase, it is mentioned in Section ‘Control of the apex height of the upper leg’ that
If the system damping is compensated completely through controlling and there is no other artificial damping, that is to say
The initial condition of equation (15) is
where
It is obvious that the trajectory is a set of elliptical orbits.
In summary, if given a desired apex height of the upper leg
Note that when

The ideal limit cycles corresponding to different lift-off velocities.
After the analysis above, we realize that the upper leg moves along periodic orbits if controlled well. The desired position of upper leg
Control of limit cycle
As the upper level controller, it calculates the desired height and the velocity of the upper leg in stance phase by regulating its acceleration. We use three kinds of controller here.
Open-loop controller
This is the simplest controller, setting the acceleration as constant
where
On the basis of equation (15), it is natural to think about adding derivation of the velocity from the desired value to regulate the acceleration. Therefore, we have proposed a simple
where
Because the linear controller has its shortcomings, such as overshoot and neglecting some internal dynamics, a kind of
where
Given the acceleration that is used for shifting between different limit cycles, the desired velocity and position of the upper leg in stance phase can be obtained from the time integral in the control period.
where
The controller above can achieve a stable limit cycle that not only drives the upper leg to reach a constant height, but also traces a desired curve. The simulation results will be shown in next section.
Simulation
We simulated the two-level control algorithm proposed in this paper on a two-mass platform in Matlab. Simulation results of such a two-mass hopping robot confirm efficiency of this control algorithm. Some parameters of the robot are listed in Table 1. The springy coefficient and damping coefficient are identical with the values presented by Raibert in terms of the order of magnitude. 11 Our target is to drive the robot’s apex height, that is its velocity when lifting off, to trace a sinusoidal function. The function is described as equation (24)
Parameters of the two-mass hopping robot.
where
Parameters of the three controllers.
Given the following parameters, the desired lift-off velocity of the upper leg presented in equation (24), the velocity calculated from equation (22) and the real velocity of the upper leg are shown in Figure 4.

(a) The desired lift-off velocity of the upper leg, (b) the desired velocity and real velocity of the upper leg with three different controllers.
Accelerations obtained from equations (19) to (21) are shown in Figure 5.

Accelerations obtained from three controllers.
The height of the upper leg and its deviation from the desired value are presented in Figure 6. It can be seen from Figures 4 and 6 that the robot traces the desired trajectory well with some acceptable error. Actually the algorithm proposed in this paper works well with all of the three controllers. Figure 5 shows that accelerations produced by the controllers differ from each other. As mentioned before, as a group of practicable controller parameters, it is hard to say which controller is the best one or what parameters are optimal. We just want to illustrate that all of the three controllers could acquire a relatively good performance, and that it is indicated in Figure 5 that the accelerations produced by different controllers are approximate to each other.

(a) The real and desired height of upper leg, (b) the error between the real and desired height of upper leg.
Motion trajectories of the upper leg in the
Upper leg motion trajectory in phase plane with (a) an open-loop controller, (b) a linear controller, (c) a nonlinear controller and (d) a SLIP model.

Figures 7(a) to (c) illustrates the limit cycle of the upper leg with three different controllers, and Figure 7(d) presents the limit cycle of the body with the SLIP model. The limit cycles shown in Figures 7(a) to (c) are close to each other in spite of little differences. It can be seen that the stiffness of the linear controller is larger than the other controllers and that of the SLIP model is the smallest. The precision of the velocity and the position of the upper leg with the linear controller is also the highest. Figure 7(d) shows that the precision of the SLIP model is the smallest and its distance of the run in stance phase is the longest. It is obvious that the frequency of hopping of the SLIP model is the smallest.
The contact forces are shown in Figure 8. We can learn from Figure 8(a) that contact forces between the foot and the ground with the linear controller is larger than the others except several peak points. Figure 8(b) shows the contact force between the foot and the ground of the SLIP model which indicates that the contact force is close to 350 N, while others are less than 300 N, except several peak points.

(a) Contact force between the lower leg and the ground of the two-mass model. (b) Contact force between the foot and the ground of the SLIP model.
Conclusion
We use three kinds of controllers to regulate the upper leg between different limit cycles in this paper, but it cannot be affirmed which controller is better compared to the others from the simulation results, and they have their own merits and drawbacks. The open-loop controller is the simplest but its anti-interference ability is weak; the linear controller is also simple and brings in state feedback of the upper leg, but the output of this controller is non-smooth; while the nonlinear controller is more complicated than the other two, but it produces smooth acceleration and has an excellent anti-interference ability. In fact, when the output of the upper level controller maintains a reasonable range there are not apparent differences among these controllers. In other words, for the three different controllers, the hopping height error and stance duration are harmonious if the accelerations of the upper leg in stance phase are close to each other produced by no matter which controller.
The SLIP model as the traditional hopping robot model has its advantages, but we also could learn from the simulation results that its contact force is larger than the two-mass model except several peaks because the SLIP model neglects the impact without controlling when touching down. The two-mass spring model is closer to the real hopping robot. Our future work will centre on controlling the real robot to bounce and extending this method to control 2D and 3D hopping. The experimental performance will be presented in the next paper in the near future.
