Energy harvesting from walking motion of a humanoid robot using a piezoelectric composite

In this paper, we investigate the energy harvesting of a piezoelectric composite in a knee pad during walking motion. We use a humanoid robot as a test bed for the experiments using the knee pad. The humanoid wears the knee pad hosting the piezoelectric composite, and its operating knee motion mimics the walking based on the data captured from a human. The use of the humanoid enables the motion to be completely repeatable. We quantitatively study the energy harvesting by using the repeated motion. An electromechanical model for the piezoelectric energy harvester is used to estimate power transferred to varied load resistances under the repeated knee motion. With a good agreement between the experiments and the model predictions, we demonstrate power harvesting on the order of ten microWatts.