Design, Modeling, and Analysis of a Liquid Cooled Proprioceptive Actuator for Legged Robots

Thermal management has always been an essential part of designing robots for extended run times in real world scenarios. Recently, legged robots that utilize proprioceptive actuators have shown impressive results in a laboratory setting, but in order for them to be successful in the real world, it is necessary to manage the excessive joule heating produced by the actuators. To address this need, this paper presents a new high performance proprioceptive actuator with liquid cooling designed for dynamic legged robots. Prior work in the area of liquid cooled actuators fails to address how a liquid cooling system would affect the performance of a legged robotic system as a whole. This work develops a new thermal model that is capable of modeling multiple liquid cooled actuators within a single cooling system. Using this new model as a design tool we were able to determine the trades-offs between peak torque and continuous torque resulting from varying cooling systems.