Development of an Intelligent Joint Actuator Prototype for Climbing and Walking Robots

In this paper, a new joint actuator is introduced which builds the basis for the newly developed SpaceClimber robot by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. Based on in-house developed joint actuators for ambu-lating robots, this complete new design combines performance, stability, and space-related components. The newly developed on-board electronics enables the possibility of a biologically inspired functionality like decentralized au-tonomous joint control. In this paper, we explain the design and the control architecture of the actuator. We describe the selected components and present the fully functional prototype. The results of the first performance experiments are presented.