Reducing robot energy consumption

Robots could reduce their power consumption by as much as 10-fold by ‘stutter jumping’ - taking a short hop before a big jump.

The formula for the two-part jump was discovered by analysing nearly 20,000 jumps made by a simple spring-based ‘pogo-stick’ laboratory robot under a wide range of conditions.

“If we time things right, the robot can jump with a tenth of the power required to jump to the same height under other conditions,” said Daniel Goldman, an assistant professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “In the stutter jumps, we can move the mass at a lower frequency to get off the ground. We achieve the same take-off velocity as a conventional jump but it is developed over a longer period of time with much less power.”

The amount of energy that can be stored in batteries can limit the range and duration of robotic missions, so the stutter jump could be helpful for small robots that have limited power. Optimising the efficiency of jumping could therefore allow the robots to complete longer and more complex missions.