Athletic robots demand a whole-body actuation system design that utilizes motors up to the boundaries of their performance. However, creating such robots poses challenges of integrating design principles and reasoning of practical design choices. This paper presents a design framework that guides designers to find optimal design choices to create an actuation system that can rapidly generate torques and velocities required to achieve a given set of tasks, by minimizing inertia and leveraging cooperation between actuators. The framework serves as an interactive tool for designers who are in charge of providing design rules and candidate components such as motors, reduction mechanism, and coupling mechanisms between actuators and joints. A binary integer linear optimization explores design combinations to find optimal components that can achieve a set of tasks. The framework is demonstrated with 200 optimal design studies of a biped with 5-degree-of-freedom (DoF) legs, focusing on the effect of achieving multiple tasks (walking, lifting), constraining the mass budget of all motors in the system and the use of coupling mechanisms. The result provides a comprehensive view of how design choices and rules affect reflected inertia, copper loss of motors, and force capability of optimal actuation systems.

翻译：运动型机器人需要设计全身驱动系统，使电机运行至其性能边界。然而，此类机器人的制造面临整合设计原理与合理化实际设计抉择的挑战。本文提出一种设计框架，引导设计者通过最小化惯量并利用驱动器之间的协同作用，为给定任务集快速生成所需扭矩与速度的驱动系统，从而找到最优设计方案。该框架可作为交互式工具，供负责提供设计规则及候选组件（如电机、减速机构、驱动器与关节间的耦合机构）的设计者使用。通过二元整数线性优化方法探索设计组合，以找出能够实现任务集的最优组件。本框架通过200项关于具有5自由度腿部的双足机器人的最优设计研究进行验证，重点考察实现多任务（行走、举升）、约束系统内所有电机质量预算以及使用耦合机构的影响。研究结果全面展示了设计选择与规则如何影响最优驱动系统的反射惯量、电机铜损及力输出能力。