Impact acceleration of falling humanoid robot with an airbag

Abstract

Maximum absolute acceleration at impact is widely used for evaluating damage at robot fall. In this paper, we measured the impact acceleration of a life-size humanoid robot when it fell down. The experiment showed that a robot suffered maximum acceleration of over 100G at the impact. To mitigate this we tested an airbag system. Our experiment showed the airbag could reduce the peak acceleration to between 20G and 30G, which is an acceptable level for the most of robot hardware.