{"ID":2865127,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22002","arxiv_id":"2509.22002","title":"One-DoF Robotic Design of Overconstrained Limbs with Energy-Efficient, Self-Collision-Free Motion","abstract":"While it is expected to build robotic limbs with multiple degrees of freedom (DoF) inspired by nature, a single DoF design remains fundamental, providing benefits that include, but are not limited to, simplicity, robustness, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency. Mechanisms, especially those with multiple links and revolute joints connected in closed loops, play an enabling factor in introducing motion diversity for 1-DoF systems, which are usually constrained by self-collision during a full-cycle range of motion. This study presents a novel computational approach to designing one-degree-of-freedom (1-DoF) overconstrained robotic limbs for a desired spatial trajectory, while achieving energy-efficient, self-collision-free motion in full-cycle rotations. Firstly, we present the geometric optimization problem of linkage-based robotic limbs in a generalized formulation for self-collision-free design. Next, we formulate the spatial trajectory generation problem with the overconstrained linkages by optimizing the similarity and dynamic-related metrics. We further optimize the geometric shape of the overconstrained linkage to ensure smooth and collision-free motion driven by a single actuator. We validated our proposed method through various experiments, including personalized automata and bio-inspired hexapod robots. The resulting hexapod robot, featuring overconstrained robotic limbs, demonstrated outstanding energy efficiency during forward walking.","short_abstract":"While it is expected to build robotic limbs with multiple degrees of freedom (DoF) inspired by nature, a single DoF design remains fundamental, providing benefits that include, but are not limited to, simplicity, robustness, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency. Mechanisms, especially those with multiple links and revolu...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22002","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22002v1","authors":"[\"Yuping Gu\",\"Bangchao Huang\",\"Haoran Sun\",\"Ronghan Xu\",\"Jiayi Yin\",\"Wei Zhang\",\"Fang Wan\",\"Jia Pan\",\"Chaoyang Song\"]","published":"2025-09-26T07:31:03Z","proceeding":"cs.RO","tasks":"[\"cs.RO\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}