ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Robot. AI
Sec. Robot Design
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvances in Bio-Inspired Robotics: Innovations at the Intersection of Bionics and CyberneticsView all articles
Design and Control of an Energy-Efficient Gas–Oil Hybrid Servo Actuator for Quadruped Robots
Provisionally accepted
- 1The First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui University of Science and Technology, Huainan, China
- 2Anhui University of Science and Technology, Huainan, China
- 3Chery Automobile Co Ltd, Hefei, China
- 4Shandong University, Jinan, China
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This work presents a novel energy-efficient Gas–Oil hybrid servo actuator (GOhsa) designed for knee joint actuation in hydraulically-driven quadruped robots. The GOhsa system uses pre-charged high-pressure gas to pressurize hydraulic oil, converting the conventional dual-chamber pressure servo control (typically used in symmetric valve-controlled asymmetric hydraulic cylinders) into a single-chamber pressure servo configuration. This modification enables bidirectional position-force control while maintaining the original piston stroke and effective length of the hydraulic cylinder. Additionally, it eliminates the dependency of accumulator-based energy recycling on external load conditions. Based on theoretical mathematical modeling, the hydraulic stiffness and frequency response characteristics of GOhsa are analyzed to verify its feasibility for quadruped robot applications. A linearization-based force controller with dynamic compensation is proposed for GOhsa, and its control effectiveness, response capability, and energy-saving performance are validated through experiments on a single-leg test platform.
Keywords: Hydraulic actuator, gas–oil hybrid, energy efficiency, quadruped robot, Joint actuator
Received: 03 Sep 2025; Accepted: 24 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hua, Yao, Qian and Rong. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Zisen Hua, zmp3800@aust.edu.cn
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